The site at Lahard is what archaeologists call a lithic scatter, meaning a concentration of stone tools and the waste flakes produced when making them, left behind by people who did not build in materials that last. Most of what was here has been turned over and dispersed by centuries of ploughing, leaving only fragments. Yet even in that diminished state, the Lahard scatter carries unusual weight.

According to Professor P. Woodman of University College Cork, this is the best concentration of Later Mesolithic flint on this entire stretch of coastline. The Mesolithic, broadly speaking, covers the period of Irish prehistory before farming arrived, when people lived by hunting, fishing, and gathering. The Later Mesolithic in Ireland is generally associated with the period from around 7000 to 4000 BC, a time when small, mobile groups worked coastal and riverine environments with considerable skill. The flints at Lahard are physical traces of those people, found just to the north of the Doonpower promontory fort, a much later monument where a headland was cut off by an earthen bank to create a defended enclosure. The proximity of the two sites is coincidental in terms of date, the promontory fort belonging to a far later period, but it gives a sense of how repeatedly and over how long a span this particular edge of land attracted attention.