These are shell middens, essentially ancient rubbish heaps, and along roughly 100 metres of cliff-face they sit on a wave-cut platform, buried beneath sand-dunes several metres deep. The sea, which has been gradually eating into the dunes, has done archaeologists an accidental favour by revealing what lies within.

Excavations carried out in 1983, 1984, and 1985 uncovered pits, hearths, and dense occupation debris across a series of settlement sites. The shells are predominantly whelk, limpet, and periwinkle, and alongside them researchers recovered fish bones, fish scales, and the bones of wild pig and red deer. A flint plano-convex knife had already turned up at the site in the mid-1970s, pointing to earlier human activity, and the subsequent digs confirmed this. The stone tools found here include Bann flakes, blades, chopper tools, picks, and stone axes, and the raw materials used to make them are geologically telling: the main sources were greenish-blue rhyolites and volcanic ashes that outcrop near Dunquin, several kilometres to the south. This means the people using this site were either travelling to gather their materials or maintaining connections with those who did. Charcoal samples produced radiocarbon dates ranging from approximately 3670 to 3240 bc, placing the settlements at the boundary between the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods. The Mesolithic was the era of hunter-gatherers in Ireland, before farming arrived; the Neolithic brought agriculture and a different way of organising life. The material culture at Ferriter's Cove, however, remained largely Mesolithic in character even as that boundary was being crossed elsewhere, suggesting a community that continued fishing and foraging while the world around it was beginning to change.