A shell midden, the accumulated food waste of past inhabitants, runs intermittently along a 35-metre stretch of the beach, its layers of limpets, winkles, mussels, and oysters exposed where the bank is cutting back. Middens are among the more quietly informative archaeological features a coastline can produce; they are essentially ancient kitchen refuse heaps, but the species they contain can reveal a great deal about diet, season, and the reach of local trade networks.

What makes this particular deposit unusual is a detail that local knowledge supplies: oysters do not occur naturally in this part of Connemara. Their presence in the midden suggests that someone, at some point, was either travelling to obtain them or had access to a supply brought in from elsewhere. The midden material has also been found lying beneath the remnants of modern house foundations, which are themselves eroding out of the same embankment, placing the shell deposits in a domestic context. The interleaving of the two, old food waste and the structural traces of more recent habitation collapsing together into the same sandy section, gives the site a compressed, layered quality that is easy to overlook from the beach itself.