The site is a midden, which is simply a refuse heap, in this case composed mainly of discarded oyster shells built up over time by people who lived and ate along this shore. What makes this particular deposit unusual is how it came to light: in September 1937, a low sea wall collapsed, and the midden material was exposed in the process. It was noted that year by Coleman, whose 1938 account preserves the first formal record of the find.

Radiocarbon dating has since placed the oyster shells within a calibrated date range of roughly 1490 to 1680 AD, suggesting the midden accumulated during the late medieval and early modern period, somewhere between the close of the fifteenth century and the early seventeenth. That span covers a period of considerable upheaval in Munster, including the Desmond rebellions and the Elizabethan plantation, though the midden itself speaks to something more ordinary: the steady, repeated consumption of shellfish from Cork Harbour, one of Ireland's most productive estuaries. The radiocarbon determination was processed by Beta Analytic under laboratory reference Beta 155381, and the result was published by Milner and Woodman in 2007.

The midden material is still visible in patches along the shoreline, running from east of a concrete breakwater southward to the vicinity of a structure known locally as the Pedestal tower. It does not announce itself dramatically; the shells appear in irregular exposures in the coastal bank, easy to overlook unless you are specifically looking at the ground rather than the water.