The island, roughly 240 metres north to south and 95 metres east to west, sits under pasture today and floods regularly. Nothing of its former structures survives above ground, yet the Ordnance Survey maps of both 1840 and 1907 record the ford in careful detail, shown as a double dashed line crossing eastward from the Clocully side of the river onto the upper eastern shore, a crossing of around 50 metres. From there the line continued across the island itself and then traced the townland boundary southward along the river for approximately 120 metres, eventually meeting a track in Knocknadempsey townland at the island's south-western point. The ford was, in other words, not a simple crossing but a route, threading through the island as a deliberate passage between two banks.

The island was once inhabited. The Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, a detailed land record compiled in the aftermath of the Cromwellian wars, records both a house and a bawn on this small patch of ground. A bawn was a walled enclosure, typically of stone, built to protect livestock or defend a dwelling, and their presence usually signals a household of some local consequence. That a bawn and house were considered worth recording here suggests the ford was a working feature of the landscape at the time, giving the island real utility as a crossing point or a defensible residence in the River Suir. By the time the Ordnance Survey cartographers mapped it in the nineteenth century, the structures were already gone, but the ford route remained in use or at least in memory. Today, no trace of the crossing is visible in the river.