That uncertainty is precisely what makes it worth knowing about. Composed of large angular and rounded limestone boulders, including one particularly massive block on its eastern side, the feature sits roughly 40 metres south of the lake's original shoreline, separated from it by wet, marshy ground. It slopes gradually southward toward the water, and it looks, quite convincingly, like a crannog, the term for an artificial or partially artificial island, typically built during the early medieval period as a defended dwelling place. Whether the resemblance reflects genuine human construction or a trick of geology is still an open question.

Archaeologist Aidan O'Sullivan, writing in 2004, catalogued the site as Dysart 5 and noted that before drainage works altered the local water levels, the platform would have been surrounded by approximately a metre of water, making the crannog resemblance all the more plausible. He concluded that while it cannot be confirmed as an archaeological site, it is a genuinely distinctive feature along an otherwise level foreshore. What adds weight to the ambiguity is the company it keeps. Just 130 metres to the north-west stands Dún na Sgiath, a royal ringfort whose name translates roughly as the Fort of the Shields, a site associated with the early medieval kingship of Meath. A further 200 metres to the south-south-west lies another confirmed crannog. The platform at Dysart 5 sits, in other words, within a landscape that was clearly of considerable significance in early medieval Ireland, which makes the possibility of its being a man-made island somewhat harder to dismiss, even if the evidence for that remains inconclusive.