What looks, at first glance, like a natural rise in the land is almost certainly a crannog, one of the artificial or semi-artificial island settlements that were built on Irish lakes and wetlands from the Bronze Age through to as late as the seventeenth century. The mound measures roughly 29 metres across and rises to more than 1.5 metres above the surrounding terrain, dimensions consistent with the constructed platforms of timber, peat, brushwood, and stone that ancient communities used to establish defensible dwellings in shallow water or marginal wetland.

Crannogs served as farmsteads, refuges, and occasionally as seats of local power, their watery setting making them naturally difficult to approach without a boat or a causeway. The Belmont example sits close to the western shore of Altore Lough, occupying the kind of liminal zone, neither fully land nor fully lake, that such sites tend to favour. The hawthorn growth that now covers it has, over time, both obscured the mound and helped to stabilise it, though it also makes the underlying structure harder to read from ground level. Without excavation, the precise period of construction and occupation at this particular site remains unknown.