When drainage works around 1960 caused water levels to drop, a small island appeared, reachable by wading along a submerged causeway from the shore. What that falling water revealed was almost certainly a crannog, an artificially constructed or artificially modified island, typically built from layers of timber, peat, brush, and stone, used in Ireland from the Bronze Age through to the early modern period as defensible homesteads or places of refuge.

By 1985, the site had yielded a further detail: flooring planks, laid out and clearly visible to anyone who looked. That glimpse of worked timber, preserved for centuries in the cold anaerobic conditions of a lough bed, is precisely the kind of evidence that makes crannogs so compelling to archaeologists. Water is a remarkable conservator. But since that observation, vegetation has closed over the site entirely, and what was briefly legible has retreated again into obscurity. The account comes from John Coakley, recorded in 2021, and it has the quality of local knowledge passed carefully from one generation to the next, a memory of a morning when the lough gave something away that it has since taken back.