When the water level in the lake is high, it becomes faintly legible: a raised bank roughly ten metres wide and about half a metre above the surrounding ground, ghosting up through the surface. At other times it disappears entirely under grass and accumulated shoreline, absorbed into the landscape so thoroughly that the island it once served no longer reads as an island at all.

Lady's Island was historically a triangular sliver of land, roughly 700 metres from north to south and about 220 metres across at its widest southern point, sitting within the lough that was known in the seventeenth century as Lough Togher. The lake itself is unusual: a semi-saltwater lagoon, separated from the sea by a shingle bar through which salt water seeps, and which is occasionally breached altogether. The causeway, probably a natural shingle spit rather than a deliberate construction, was the sole means of reaching the island, used by pilgrims making their way to the church that still stands there. On the island side, a tower house and an attached gatehouse once regulated who passed through; a bawn, which is an enclosed courtyard typical of later medieval fortified sites, sat at the southern end of the causeway approach, with what would have been a gateway controlling entry from the lakeshore some hundred metres to the north. The combination of a natural crossing, a fortified entry sequence, and a pilgrim destination makes this a quietly layered piece of medieval infrastructure.

The shoreline has since extended outward to meet the island, so the sense of crossing water has been lost entirely for most visitors. When lake levels are elevated, the old bank reasserts itself beneath the road surface, a reminder that what now feels like ordinary ground was once the only thread connecting pilgrims on the mainland to whatever they had come to find.