The island, measuring only about 29 metres across at its widest, is unremarkable to look at, but beneath the water around it, eel fishermen once brought up bronze spearheads and gun barrels tangled in the prongs of their spears. The combination alone, weapons spanning millennia dredged from the same lakebed, suggests a site that accumulated significance across a very long stretch of time.

The earliest detailed account comes from Kinahan, writing between 1881 and 1884, who described the island as apparently surrounded by a circle of timber piles driven into the lakebed. This kind of structure is associated with crannogs, artificial or artificially modified islands used as defended lake dwellings throughout Irish prehistory and into the early medieval period. The bronze spearheads brought up by fishermen would be consistent with prehistoric activity at such a site. The gun barrels belong to a much later story. According to local account, they were sunk in the lake in the aftermath of the 1798 rebellion, when firearms across the country were seized by British authorities and ordered to be destroyed or surrendered; concealing them in a lake would have been one way to keep them out of official hands. Kinahan also noted, on the eastern side of the island, traces of four canoes with their prows turned toward the shore. An attempt was made to raise one of them, a single-piece oak canoe, but it had deteriorated so badly in the water that it broke apart during the attempt.

A snorkel dive carried out in the late 1990s found no trace of the circle of piles Kinahan had described, though the sediment and vegetation of a lough bottom can conceal a great deal. The bronze spearheads and gun barrels, the canoes, and the possible crannog structure remain largely unexcavated and, for now, unresolved.