A crannog is an artificial or partially artificial island, typically built out into a lake as a defended dwelling place, and they were constructed and used in Ireland from the Neolithic period through to the early medieval era. This particular example belongs to what researchers have called the "metalling type", a variant first identified at Lough Gara in County Sligo, characterised not by the usual mass of timber and brushwood but by a closely packed surface of small broken stones forming a roughly circular platform.

The site was recorded in May 1969 by Raftery, who noted a slightly rounded mound rising about 50 centimetres above the shoreline, with a stone-covered surface approximately 15 metres in diameter. Horizontal timbers and vertical wooden posts were present, though it was difficult to determine whether these were structural or simply the remains of natural tree stumps. More striking was the scatter of material found across the central area: stone flakes, axeheads, and hammerstones, an assemblage consistent with Mesolithic activity, placing potential human use of this lakeshore in a period stretching back thousands of years before the early medieval crannogs more commonly associated with the form. When survey teams returned in 2001 and 2003, they found no surface trace of the structure at all. It is possible that what Raftery recorded as "Kinale 1" corresponds to a nearby settlement platform identified during the later work, but the identification remains uncertain. Lough Kinale also preserves two further crannog sites in the same stretch of water, suggesting the lake held sustained significance for communities across a very long span of time.