The site is now a marshy hollow thick with reeds and scrub, and the island itself is not discernible at ground level. A crannog, for those unfamiliar with the term, is an artificial or partly artificial island built in a lake or wetland, typically during the early medieval period, and used as a defended dwelling place. This one has effectively been swallowed twice: first by drainage works that removed the lake, and then by the vegetation that moved in afterwards.

The crannog appeared on Ordnance Survey maps of both 1838 and 1920 as a small, roughly wedge-shaped island at the south-western end of Ballin Lough, measuring around 30 metres on its longer axis and between 7 and 15 metres across. The antiquarian W. G. Wood-Martin, writing in 1886, called it West Island and noted that during dry seasons it was connected to the lakeshore, suggesting it was always a marginal, semi-attached kind of place rather than a firmly isolated refuge. Wood-Martin also carried out what he termed an excavation at the centre of the island. The upper 0.6 metres yielded bog, clay, and a few bones. Below that, he found wood ash packed with charred bones, the kind of deposit that points to prolonged occupation and repeated burning, though the precise nature and date of that activity was not established. Two further crannogs formerly occupied the same lake, one roughly 80 metres to the north-east and another about 260 metres to the east, suggesting that Ballin Lough, before it was drained, held a small cluster of these lake settlements.