It is a crannog, a type of man-made or partially man-made island dwelling that was used across Ireland and Scotland from the Bronze Age through to the early medieval period and occasionally beyond. Builders would pile up timber, stone, peat, and brushwood in shallow water, sometimes anchoring the mass with wooden stakes, to create a defensible living platform accessible only by boat or a concealed wooden causeway.

Crannogs were not marginal or desperate solutions to the problem of where to live. They were, in many cases, high-status settlements, the homes of local chieftains and their households, chosen precisely because a stretch of water offered better security than any earthen bank. Hundreds have been identified across Ireland, with particularly dense concentrations in the drumlin lake country of the midlands and west. Mayo has its share, scattered across the county's many loughs, though individual sites vary enormously in what survives and what has been studied. The placename Derryloughan More contains the Irish elements for oak wood and lake, which fits the kind of wooded lakeshore environment in which crannogs were typically constructed.

Beyond its existence as a recorded monument, the specific history of this particular site, its date of construction, the people who built or occupied it, and its current physical condition, remains undocumented in any publicly available form at present.