The word itself is mundane enough, derived from a Scandinavian term for a rubbish heap, but middens are anything but insignificant to archaeologists. These accumulated deposits of shells, bones, charcoal, pottery fragments, and domestic debris are among the most informative sites the ancient world left behind, preserving a compressed record of how people ate, worked, and disposed of what they no longer needed. Coastal middens in particular can contain layer upon layer of material spanning centuries, each stratum a kind of slow archive of daily life.

The Grange area of Sligo sits close to the shoreline of Drumcliff Bay, a landscape that has been inhabited since prehistoric times and that sits in the broader shadow of Ben Bulben to the south-east. Shell middens along the western Irish coast have in other cases been dated to the Mesolithic period, though without the specific excavation or survey data for this particular site it would be speculative to assign it a date or a cultural context. What can be said is that the formal recording of the site reflects an ongoing effort to catalogue such monuments across Ireland, however modest or fragmentary they may appear on the surface.