Ordnance Survey maps mark it clearly as a circular island. Whether it is natural or something older and more deliberate is, officially, unresolved.

The site appears in the archaeological record under the name Shaunoge Shallows, and is listed as a possible crannog. A crannog is an artificial or partially artificial island, typically built up from timber, stone, and brushwork, and used as a defensive or high-status dwelling site, most commonly in the early medieval period in Ireland. O'Sullivan, writing in 2004, described the islet as a small, rocky, oval mound measuring roughly 25 metres north to south and 20 metres east to west, rising about 3.5 metres above the waterline. It sits approximately 60 metres from the natural islands off the Ladestown townland shoreline, and 130 metres from the original lake edge itself. The complication is that the island as it exists today is not entirely the island as it once was. Since the 1950s, water levels in Lough Ennell have dropped, leaving the islet sitting higher and appearing larger than it would have done in earlier centuries. That shift in the waterline makes it genuinely difficult to distinguish what might be artificial construction from what is simply exposed lakebed and rock. As it stands, the site can only be described as a possible crannog, and that uncertainty has never been formally resolved.