The mechanism, as local tradition had it, was a rope tied to a net in the river, threaded back to a small building on an island midstream, where the tug of a fish would set the bell in motion. The building is gone now, the island apparently gone too, and the whole arrangement survives only in a few lines of recorded folklore and a single annotation on an old map.

The 1840 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map marks the structure as a 'Watch Ho.', a watch house, shown sitting on an island at the centre of the Camoge River, directly beside an eel weir. Eel weirs were fixed structures, usually timber or stone, designed to funnel migrating eels into traps, and they were a significant source of income for medieval monastic communities. This one sat roughly 115 metres north of the Cistercian abbey of Monasteranenagh, a foundation with deep roots in the region. The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp visited in 1889 and recorded what he found, which was not much even then. He noted some remains of a detached building near the river, suggested it might have been a mill, and added the local account of the rope-and-bell system for detecting salmon. His published description closed with a pointed remark about the neglected state of the ruins defying description and calling for remedy. No remedy came.

Today there is nothing to see at the site itself. The watch house is gone, and the island it stood on is no longer visible in the river. The abbey ruins at Monasteranenagh are still accessible and worth visiting in their own right, and the Camoge flows nearby, but the watch house has left no surface trace. What remains is the record: a map annotation, a few sentences from Westropp, and the image of a bell ringing in a small island building every time the river gave up a fish.