Here, scattered across the sands and gravels of the intertidal zone, lies a substantial collection of worked flint tools that date back to the Earlier Mesolithic period, roughly 8,000 to 10,000 years ago. The site, known as Eleven Ballyboes, has yielded flakes, blades and cores; the fundamental toolkit of hunter-gatherers who once called this coastline home.

The origins of these ancient artefacts remain intriguingly uncertain. They may have washed out from a midden or settlement site located on the ground above the beach, gradually eroding down to their current resting place. More fascinatingly, these tools might be remnants of a palaeo-landscape, an ancient land surface that has since been claimed by rising sea levels and now lies submerged beneath the waters of Lough Foyle. This theory gains weight from similar lithic discoveries in the immediate vicinity, including finds at an adjacent cove just 90 metres to the east and another concentration uncovered in 2019 about 100 metres to the northwest.

The site can only be accessed during low tides, when the retreating waters expose this window into prehistoric Ireland. The extensive scatter of worked flint first came to archaeological attention through the work of McNaught in 1998, with subsequent investigations by the National Museum of Ireland confirming the significance of the finds. For those interested in Ireland's deep past, Eleven Ballyboes offers a rare opportunity to walk amongst the tools of the island's earliest known inhabitants, left behind millennia ago when the coastline looked very different from today.