In 1969, an assemblage of thirty artefacts came to light at this waterlogged shoreline: twenty-four chert flakes, five stone axeheads, and a hammerstone, all assigned to the Late Mesolithic period, roughly seven to ten thousand years ago. The chert flakes are the debris of tool-making, the waste material left behind when a skilled hand struck stone against stone to produce a sharp edge. Together with the axeheads and hammerstone, they suggest that people were working, perhaps camping, at the edge of this lake at a time when Ireland was still sparsely populated by small, mobile hunter-gatherer communities.

The site, known in the archaeological literature as Lough Kinale 1, was noted by researchers including Mitchell in 1970 and Raftery in 1972, and has featured in subsequent scholarship on Irish prehistoric settlement. What makes it quietly puzzling is its apparent isolation. Survey teams returned to the foreshore in both 2001 and 2003 and searched the area thoroughly, yet found nothing further. The original assemblage remains an outlier, a small concentrated deposit with no obvious continuation. One possible explanation lies nearby: a possible crannog was also identified at the same location in 1969. A crannog is an artificial or partly artificial island, typically built in a lake or wetland, and while they are most commonly associated with early medieval occupation, some have origins reaching back much further. Whether the lithic scatter and the possible crannog are genuinely connected, or simply neighbours by coincidence, remains an open question in the research.