No walls break the surface, no foundations catch the eye. What is known about the site comes entirely from the air, specifically from a single aerial photograph taken in May 1977, in which the outlines of a rectangular structure and the walls of a bawn appear as cropmarks, the kind of differential growth in grass or grain that reveals buried stonework invisible at ground level.

The structure sits within the northern corner of a bawn, a walled enclosure typically built to protect a house and its occupants, a form common in Ireland from the late medieval period through the seventeenth century. The northwest angle of the bawn appears to incorporate two sides of the rectangular building itself. A documentary trace survives from the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1655, which describes the "colpe of Cloghcully" as containing "two thatcht houses with chemnyes and a Bawne about them, some cabbins and an orchard," held under the proprietorship of Edmond Butler of Cloghcully and his father Thomas, Lord Baron of Cahir, both recorded in the survey as "Irish Papists," the standard Protestant administration shorthand of the period for Catholic landowners. The survey also notes that "the River Sewer runeth by the sd lands," a reference that fits the island's position in the Suir. That said, the documentary reference may relate to Clocully Castle, which stands roughly 300 metres to the northeast, rather than to the island itself. The aerial evidence, however, points clearly to occupation on the island, whatever its precise relationship to the Butler household recorded in the survey.

The island is subject to flooding, which may partly explain why so little survives above ground, and why the site has attracted relatively little attention despite its unusual character as a river-island enclosure with documentary and aerial evidence pointing in the same direction.