But beneath the surface, these are shell middens, the accumulated domestic refuse of people who lived and ate here long ago, and the objects that have come out of them sit oddly together: a whetstone for sharpening blades, a sliotar (the small hard ball used in the Gaelic game of hurling), a glass or stone bead, a pig's lower incisor, and fragments of a young child's skull, teeth, and ribs.

A midden is essentially a rubbish heap, built up gradually as communities discarded the debris of daily life, and the contents of these three mounds follow a familiar Atlantic coastal pattern, composed mainly of oyster and cockle shells along with burnt stones. The Magherabeg sites sit roughly 100 to 150 metres from the shore on the eastern side of Brandon Bay, tucked into the dune landscape on the western side of the peninsula. The mix of objects recovered, recorded by the National Museum of Ireland and by the Cork and Kerry Fisheries Committee in 1951, gestures at a community with domestic animals, craft activity, and at least one child who did not survive. The sliotar is the quietly arresting detail: it places a recognisably Irish game somewhere in the sequence of occupation at this site, though exactly when is not established. J. Cuppage documented these mounds in the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, and they remain among the quieter entries in a landscape already crowded with early Christian monuments, promontory forts, and ogham stones.