It is a crannog, a type of man-made island dwelling common in early medieval Ireland and Scotland, typically built from timber, peat, and stone and used as a defensible homestead, but this particular example raises an obvious question: what was it actually for, if people could barely stand on it?

The site only came to wider attention around the turn of the twentieth century, when falling water levels in the lake exposed what had previously been invisible. A researcher named Hall, writing in 1910, documented what emerged: a small island ringed with outwardly angled pointed stakes, the kind of defensive perimeter that would have made any uninvited approach by boat a hazardous business. Hall was candid about the puzzle the site presented, observing that it could scarcely ever have been made use of in the usual sense, given how thoroughly it had been submerged. There was a single gap in the stake perimeter, one landing place left deliberately clear of obstacles, and it faced inward, towards a second, larger crannog sitting about seventy metres to the north-east. That larger island, still present in the lough roughly a hundred metres from the shore, was presumably the inhabited one.

The relationship between the two islands is what gives this site its quiet strangeness. The smaller crannog, with its single accessible face oriented towards its larger neighbour, looks less like a dwelling and more like a dependency, perhaps a livestock platform, a storage structure, or some kind of outpost whose precise function has not survived the water that once covered it.