It measures roughly 25 metres across and rises only 0.6 metres above the surrounding ground, with a V-shaped depression sunk into its interior. A line of pine trees marks its perimeter, which gives the whole thing a faintly deliberate quality, as though the landscape is still trying to remember its own outline. This is a crannog, an artificial island built up from timber, peat, brushwood, and stone, used throughout prehistoric and early medieval Ireland as a place to live, and sometimes to retreat to, surrounded by water that offered a natural defence.

The lake that once surrounded this platform was Corralough, and the name carries a story of its own. According to the Ordnance Survey Letters compiled by John O'Donovan and later edited by Michael O'Flanagan in 1927, the placename derives from an association with a figure called Nuala na Meadóige, meaning Nuala of the Knife, described as a celebrated heroine. Whether this refers to a mythological figure, a local folk memory, or something in between is not recorded, but the name alone suggests the site was not always as anonymous as it now appears. Approximately 200 metres to the east, there is a second possible lake dwelling, which raises the question of whether this was once a more active or contested stretch of water than the marshy ground now implies.