The raised area measures just under seventeen metres north to south and about twenty-four metres east to west, rising only a metre above the surrounding wetland, and is overgrown with hummocky tufts of grass. What makes it quietly puzzling is the absence of any timber, and the difficulty of pinning down its original form; the edges appear to have been cut away at some point, most likely for turf extraction, leaving a crescent shape that only becomes legible on later Ordnance Survey mapping. The site does not appear at all on the first edition six-inch OS maps, which means it either escaped the surveyors' notice in the nineteenth century or had not yet taken on a form they considered worth recording.

The structure bears a resemblance to a crannog, an artificial or semi-artificial island dwelling of the sort built across Ireland and Scotland from the Bronze Age through to the early modern period, typically constructed from timber, brushwood, and stone piled into a lough and sometimes connected to the shore by a causeway exactly like the one here. The absence of visible timber at Lisgarode is not necessarily unusual; wood rots or gets removed, and waterlogged conditions can obscure what survives below the surface. The causeway itself, roughly three metres wide and sitting only about thirty centimetres above the surrounding ground, is a modest but purposeful piece of construction, oriented to connect the island to firmer land to the east. Whether the island was ever a habitation site, a place of storage, or served some other function entirely, the surviving physical evidence does not settle the question.