The name points towards an early Christian religious community, probably a nunnery, yet local folklore links the island to Vikings, just as it does with two neighbouring islands on the same lough. That combination, monastic women and Norse raiders sharing the same small patch of water in popular memory, is unusual enough to warrant a closer look.

The island sits in Lough Lene, with Castle Island roughly 560 metres to the south-south-west and Turgesius Island about 330 metres to the south-south-east. The latter name is itself significant: Turgesius was a prominent Viking leader in early medieval Ireland, and his appearing in the place-names here suggests the area made a strong impression on local memory. The island itself may originally have been a crannóg, an artificial or artificially modified island constructed in a lake, often for defensive or residential purposes during the early medieval period. Archaeologist A. O'Sullivan noted in 2004 that it appears to be a natural island that was enhanced and kerbed, probably during that same early medieval phase. The ecclesiastical dimension is supported by cartographic evidence: the Down Survey map of 1657, one of the earliest systematic land surveys of Ireland, depicts a church standing on the island in the map of St. Fechin's parish, and a separate Down Survey map of Fore barony annotates the same feature simply as "a church". Whether that structure ever functioned as a nunnery cannot be confirmed from the surviving evidence, but the placename strongly implies some connection to female religious life.