On most days there is nothing to see, but in the right conditions the cairn breaches the surface, briefly making visible what is otherwise a submerged relic. Satellite imagery has caught it in these moments of partial exposure.

The cairn is the remnant of a crannog, an artificial or partly artificial island of the kind built across Ireland and Scotland from the Bronze Age well into the early medieval period, typically as a defensive dwelling place set out on a lake. What survives at Drumate sits at the centre of the roughly subrectangular eastern portion of Freagh Lough, a lake with an unusual footprint: a main body running approximately 375 metres northeast to southwest, with a rectangular arm extending northwest from the southern end. Notably, the lake has not been reduced by the drainage schemes that have altered so many Irish loughs over the past two centuries, which may help explain why the crannog remains largely intact and undisturbed, if largely invisible. The three trees rooted into its submerged cairn are a quiet anomaly, growing from a platform that no longer quite exists above water.