As the dunes erode along the coast near Slyne Head, they expose layer upon layer of shell refuse, the accumulated waste of people who ate here, cooked here, and built here long ago. These are middens, essentially ancient rubbish heaps, and they are among the more honest records a community can leave behind. What the dunes at Ballinaleama reveal is an extensive series of such deposits: charcoal, burnt stones, and dense accumulations of periwinkle, whelk, and broken limpet shells, the kind of assemblage that speaks quietly but clearly of repeated occupation and a diet drawn heavily from the shoreline.

The eroding dune faces also expose what appear to be structural remains, a number of walls and a possible hut, suggesting that this was not merely a processing site but somewhere people actually lived, at least seasonally. The naturalist Robert Lloyd Praeger, writing in a work cited from 1980, noted a circular stone hut somewhere near Slyne Head, and it is plausible that he was describing something in this vicinity. References in the Killanin guides of 1954 and 1967 also point to the area, which suggests the site attracted the attention of curious observers across several decades before any formal archaeological notice was taken. Stone huts of this kind, small and corbelled or dry-walled, are known from various periods along the Irish Atlantic coast, and without excavation it is difficult to assign a precise date to what survives here.

The site sits within a landscape already marginal and exposed, at the end of a peninsula that breaks apart into the island scatter of Slyne Head. The dune erosion that makes the archaeology visible is also, gradually, destroying it, which gives the place an oddly transient quality. What is visible today may be more or less than what was visible when Praeger passed through, or when the Killanin guides were written.