They are easy to overlook, especially given that the same peat bed contains a tangle of preserved tree trunks, roots, and branches, the remnants of a long-drowned landscape. But eighteen of these stakes have been identified as distinctly man-made, with a further twelve possible examples, and together they hint at deliberate human activity in a place that the sea has since reclaimed.

The stakes were first noticed in June 2015, exposed by coastal erosion, and surveyed the following month by the Achill Archaeological Field School. The row runs roughly northeast to southwest across approximately 5.75 metres of confirmed stakes, and perhaps as much as 17 metres if the possible examples are included. The individual stakes are modest in scale, between 3 and 6 centimetres in diameter, and set between 0.2 and 0.6 metres apart, with most grouped more closely at 0.2 to 0.3 metres. One interpretation, favoured by the field school, is that this is a fish weir or trap, a structure designed to intercept fish carried on the tide by exploiting the mouth of a stream that once discharged into the intertidal zone. A fish weir works by channelling water through a narrow gap lined with stakes or netting, trapping fish as the tide ebbs. The alternative reading is more ancient still: if the stakes predate the peat's inundation by rising sea levels, then the row may simply be the remains of a fence, marking a boundary in a landscape that was, at that time, dry land.