The violent winter weather of December 2013 and January 2014 stripped back the land enough to reveal a shell midden, a compacted deposit of discarded shellfish remains left behind by people who once gathered and ate here, sitting roughly half a metre below the existing sod cover. These middens are among the most unassuming forms of archaeological evidence imaginable, essentially ancient rubbish heaps, yet they can preserve a precise record of diet, season, and coastal activity across centuries or even millennia.

The deposit runs for approximately thirty metres along a south-west-facing cliff edge in a small cove, and is thickest towards its southern end, where the accumulation reaches up to thirty centimetres deep. The medium grey soils within it contain various shells alongside flecks of charcoal and fire-cracked rock, the latter being a reliable indicator of cooking activity, produced when stones used to heat food or water are repeatedly exposed to flame and then cool rapidly. No animal bones or artefacts were recovered from the visible material, which means the midden offers texture without easy answers: people were here, they gathered shellfish, they lit fires, and then they left no other obvious trace of themselves. The site sits within the sheltered inlet of Cuan an Mhada, the Irish name for Dogs Bay, a bay more often noted for its unusually pale shell-sand beach than for what lies buried along its margins.