A crannog, for those unfamiliar with the term, is a man-made or partially man-made island dwelling, typically constructed from layers of timber, stone, peat, and brushwood driven into the bed of a shallow lake or wetland. They were built and inhabited across Ireland and Scotland from the Bronze Age well into the early medieval period, sometimes as late as the seventeenth century, and they functioned as secure, defensible homesteads, accessible only by boat or narrow causeway. The one at Curragh is, for now, a site defined more by what is unknown about it than by what has been recorded.