Coastal erosion has cut into the land and exposed a shell midden, essentially a prehistoric rubbish heap, that would otherwise have remained buried and unnoticed. What it reveals is a small but telling snapshot of life on this remote Kerry island roughly two and a half thousand years ago.

The exposed deposit is modest in size, roughly four metres by two and only about twenty centimetres thick on average, but its contents are unusually varied. Limpets make up the bulk of it, as they do in most Irish coastal middens, but scallop and oyster shells are also present, along with animal bone and, more unexpectedly, red deer teeth. The stones within the deposit are water-rolled pebbles, many of them shattered, suggesting repeated use around fire. A radiocarbon date taken from a sample of the limpet shells returned a result of 2380 plus or minus 50 BP, placing the deposit in the later prehistoric period, around the fourth or fifth century BC. Two finds recovered directly from the midden add further texture. In 1983, a stone axehead was found protruding from its edge. Five years later, a granite pounder with worn, abraded ends turned up resting on the midden's upper surface. Both objects are now held by the National Museum of Ireland. The old field walls nearby, built from the same water-rolled stone, suggest that the midden sits within a broader landscape of past activity on the island, one that the retreating shoreline continues, slowly, to expose.