The traces of that vanished land bridge are still faintly legible on both sides, a broken seam between island and shore. What remains on Bishop's Island, roughly 200 metres east to west and 110 metres north to south, is visible but unreachable: two stone buildings on the eastern half of the island, one rectangular, one round, and a standing stone, all set against the backdrop of 30-metre cliffs on the mainland opposite.

The island's name, along with the ruins of those two structures, led the antiquarian T. J. Westropp, writing in 1908, to propose that Bishop's Island was once the site of a monastic settlement. Early Irish monasticism often favoured places exactly like this, cut-off outcrops and cliff-edge promontories where solitude was enforced by geography. A fosse, which is a defensive ditch cut into the ground, runs in a straight line for some 50 metres across the south-eastern portion of the island, visible from aerial survey, and the standing stone sits within it. This combination of a ditch and a standing stone hints at an older, possibly defensive function, one that may predate any monastic use, or may have been adapted by monks who chose an already significant site. A defended headland called Doonaunroe is visible roughly 400 metres to the south-west, suggesting this stretch of the Clare coast was a place people found worth fortifying across many centuries.

The island cannot be reached at present, but the eastern ruins are clearly visible from the mainland shore. Standing on the cliff edge near Kilkee and looking west across the water, with the collapsed isthmus at your feet, the two buildings and the standing stone read as a kind of incomplete sentence, enough to ask questions, not quite enough to answer them.