Exposed for 13.5 metres along the rock, and buried beneath up to 1.8 metres of sand, is a midden, the term archaeologists use for a prehistoric or early historic refuse deposit, typically composed of the food remains discarded at a settlement over time. What makes this particular deposit worth pausing over is its layering. The bulk of the material consists of mussel shells, with periwinkles and fragments of stone scattered throughout, but a thin band of sand divides this main layer from a smaller deposit above it, and that upper layer appears to be composed exclusively of cockles. Two distinct episodes of shellfish gathering, separated by some accumulation of windblown sand, are preserved in sequence in the cliff face.

The deposit sits on a black, sticky sod layer, itself sealed beneath the sand, which is the kind of stratigraphic detail that gives archaeologists their sense of relative time. The sod would have formed in a period of stability, when the ground surface was exposed long enough for organic material to accumulate, before sand dunes advanced and buried the whole sequence. Exactly who left the shells is not recorded, but middens of this type occur across the Irish coastline and tend to indicate repeated, purposeful visits to a productive shoreline, whether by a semi-mobile population harvesting shellfish seasonally or by a settled community exploiting the immediate intertidal zone. The Iveragh Peninsula, on which Dooaghs sits, is one of the more archaeologically layered stretches of the Kerry coast, and this deposit was documented as part of a comprehensive survey of the region published by Cork University Press in 1996.