It is a crannog, an artificial or partly artificial island built from stone and other material, raised deliberately above the water as a place to live, and the fact that it stands roughly two metres above the current lake surface gives some sense of the labour involved in constructing it. Measuring approximately ninety metres east to west and sixty metres north to south, it is a substantial platform, and its covering of trees now lends it the appearance of something entirely ordinary, the kind of small wooded island common to Irish loughs. That ordinariness is deceptive.

Crannog-building was practised in Ireland from the Bronze Age onwards, continuing in some areas into the early medieval period, and these artificial islands served as defensible homesteads, their watery surroundings providing a natural barrier. At the eastern edge of this particular example, a possible causeway is still visible, which would have connected the island to the lakeshore and allowed access on foot or by boat depending on the water level. What makes the site quietly unusual is not just its own scale and preservation, but its company: another crannog lies roughly a hundred metres to the north. Two such structures within close proximity on the same lough raises questions about whether they were occupied simultaneously, by rival families or allied ones, or at entirely different periods centuries apart. The stones that make up the island's body offer no easy answers.