A dark horizontal band, just twenty centimetres thick, runs through the soil like a geological memory. Packed into it are oyster shells, periwinkles, and limpets, the compressed remnants of meals eaten long ago by people who sat at this same shoreline and discarded their shells in the same spot, over and over, until the accumulation became a layer in the earth itself.

What the eroding bank reveals is a shell midden, a type of archaeological deposit formed by the repeated disposal of shellfish remains and other food waste in a single location. Middens are among the most direct records of past diet and coastal activity that archaeology recovers. This one sits just below the present ground surface, its top layer a mere twenty centimetres down, measuring just over a metre in length and interlaced with tree and shrub roots that have since grown through it. A second midden lies only a metre and a half to the south-west, suggesting this stretch of the Monteensudder shoreline was a place of sustained, repeated use. The black discolouration of the soil is typical, the result of organic matter breaking down over a very long period within a compacted deposit.

The bank itself stands only about eighty centimetres high, and the ongoing coastal erosion that makes the midden visible in section is also the same process threatening to disperse it entirely. What is exposed now may not remain exposed in the same way for long.