The low knoll at the edge of Lough Kinale in County Longford complicates that picture considerably. What looks, at a glance, like a modest lakeshore feature, barely five metres across and rising less than half a metre above the waterline, turns out to preserve traces of human activity stretching back to the Mesolithic, thousands of years before the better-known crannog tradition took hold.

The site was first recorded by Raftery in May 1969 as one of three possible crannogs at Lough Kinale, and the small rounded knoll was later provisionally identified as his "Kinale 2" during an inspection in 2001. Excavations carried out in 2003 and 2004 revealed something more complex than a single island. Two causeway-like features, set roughly sixteen metres apart, extended out from an earlier shoreline into the lake, their "arms" of compressed soil built up by placing small stones along natural rises in the lake-bed. The eastern causeway ran to 21.3 metres in length and between five and six metres wide; the western measured 18.3 metres by six metres. Beneath the gravel, wood, peat, charcoal, and ash layers that accumulated over time, the lower edges of the site showed brushwood and worked timbers. Radiocarbon dating confirmed what the lithics, stone tools recovered from the shoreline in 2002, had already suggested: repeated Mesolithic occupation, with multiple ash spreads and hearths indicating that people returned to this spot again and again, lighting fires on what was then a very different waterscape.