But beneath the dune grass, these are shell middens, the accumulated refuse heaps of past communities, built up from layers of oyster and cockle shells, burnt stones, and whatever else people discarded over the years. It is precisely this ordinariness that makes them interesting. Middens are, in effect, ancient rubbish dumps, and rubbish tells you things that monuments rarely do.

The three mounds sit about 100 to 150 metres from the shore on the eastern side of Brandon Bay, where the peninsula curves and the Atlantic sets the conditions for daily life. What has been recovered from these sites is a peculiar and quietly affecting inventory. Alongside the expected shellfish remains and burnt stones, there is a whetstone for sharpening tools, a sliotar, the small hard ball associated with the Irish game of hurling, a bead, a pig's front incisor, and, most sombrely, fragments of the skull, teeth, and ribs of a young child. The sliotar is especially striking in context, a piece of sporting equipment turning up in the same deposit as domestic waste and human bone. Whether these objects arrived together or accumulated across different periods of use is not clear, but the combination resists any single tidy reading. The assemblage was recorded by the Cork and Kerry Field Club in 1951 and the finds are held at the National Museum of Ireland.