The lake was drained at some point after 1838, when the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map recorded it clearly, complete with a small island sitting roughly twenty metres from the eastern shore. That island is almost certainly still there, in a manner of speaking, though you would need to know what you were looking for.

A crannog is an artificial or partly artificial island, typically built up from layers of timber, peat, and stone, and used as a defended dwelling from the Bronze Age through to the early modern period in Ireland. The possible example at Ballinteean survives as a low, grass-covered rise in the wet ground, measuring roughly fourteen metres east to west and twelve metres north to south, and standing no more than a metre above the surrounding pasture. A slightly lower apron of firm ground curves around its northern side, which may represent the outer edge of the original construction. None of this is conclusive. No structural features are visible at the surface to confirm the identification, and what looks like an island remnant could, in principle, be a natural hummock. The proximity of a castle site roughly 230 metres to the west-northwest adds a suggestive layer of context; crannogs and tower houses sometimes operated in close relation to one another during the later medieval period, when controlling water and controlling land often amounted to the same thing.

The site sits within what is now agricultural ground, much of it soft underfoot, and the planted forestry in the area makes orientation across the former lakebed less straightforward than a map might suggest. The low rise itself is easy to overlook, its modest height doing little to distinguish it from ordinary field topography unless the ground around it is particularly waterlogged and the contrast becomes clearer.