At the narrow neck of land where Tramore Burrow's sand dunes meet a westward-running sand spit, there is a patch of ground that looks, at first glance, like little more than scorched earth and broken shells. It is, in fact, a midden, an ancient refuse heap left behind by people who gathered shellfish along this coastline and processed them here, above the high water mark, over what must have been repeated visits across a long period of time. The deposit is modest in scale, roughly twelve metres north to south and at least eight metres east to west, with a depth of around thirty centimetres, but its contents, burnt and broken shells embedded in a dark, organic-rich matrix, tell a quiet story of subsistence, fire, and the sea.

Middens of this kind are found at coastal sites throughout Ireland and elsewhere in the Atlantic world, and they can date anywhere from the Mesolithic period onward. The specific age of this deposit is not recorded, but its position in the dunes above the tideline is consistent with the pattern of shellfish processing that archaeologists associate with communities for whom the shoreline was both larder and workplace. The site sits at a geographically distinctive spot, the isthmus joining Burrow Island's dune system to a sand spit, a liminal zone that would have been shaped and reshaped by coastal processes over centuries, which makes the survival of the deposit all the more notable.

Since 2008, Waterford County Council has maintained a conservation project around the site. It is now enclosed within a meshed wire fence forming a circle of roughly fifty metres in diameter, and a viewing point just to the west allows visitors to observe the deposit without disturbing it. The enclosure is unobtrusive enough to fit the dune landscape, but it marks the spot clearly for anyone who knows to look for it.