Today there is nothing to see, which is precisely what makes this site worth knowing about. A midden, in archaeological terms, is a deposit of domestic refuse, most commonly shells, bones, and discarded food waste, left by people who lived and ate beside the water over long periods. This one sat on the southern side of the Douglas River where it opens into Lough Mahon, a tidal inlet east of Cork city, and it has been effectively erased.

The earliest record of the site comes from Atkinson, writing in 1874, who noted that the Cork and Passage Railway passed over a shell-mound at a point roughly a hundred yards from Rochestown Station. The Cork and Passage line, which ran along the western shore of Cork Harbour from the city south towards Passage West, was completed in the mid-nineteenth century, and its construction would have disturbed or buried any number of features along its route. By the time researchers returned to look for Atkinson's shell-mound, it had vanished entirely. Power, writing in 1930, could find no trace of it, and Coleman confirmed the same absence in 1938. Whether the railway destroyed it, whether later development obscured it, or whether it had already been reduced before Atkinson's time is not recorded.