It looks, at a glance, like an unremarkable patch of trees. What makes it more interesting is the possibility that it was not natural at all, but constructed by human hands, and that traces of that construction are still there to be seen at the waterline.

A crannog is an artificial or partly artificial island, usually built from layers of timber, peat, brushwood, and stone, and used as a defensible dwelling place from the Bronze Age through to the early modern period in Ireland. The island at Rooskybeg has long been considered a possible example of the type. In the early 1980s, the ends of wooden beams were observed protruding from the edge of the island, the kind of structural remnant that would be consistent with a crannog's underlying timber platform. A quern stone was also found at the site, a hand-operated grinding stone used for processing grain, which points to domestic activity of some kind. Neither detail is conclusive on its own, but together they suggest the island may be considerably more than it appears. The quern stone detail was passed on by John Coakley in 2021, which means local knowledge of this place has been circulating for decades without the site receiving more formal investigation.