³⁶According to Ireland's Historic Environment Viewer, with information compiled from Schot et al. 2014 and McGinley et al. 2015: "A lake was present here at the end of the last ice age, some 12,000 years ago, but it began to develop into a marsh before 8,000BC. Sometime later, possibly in the late prehistoric or early medieval period, the accumulated sediments were dug out to restore open water conditions. The existing lake, therefore, is the combined result of natural processes and human endeavour and may have been created as a ritual pond and/or as a watering hole for livestock."
The McGinley et al article also made the case for the lake to be considered as a national monument: "Lough Lugh shares many of the characteristics of a monument insofar as monuments are generally manmade; they are related to memory and place-making and are often locales of ritual activity...the conspicuous setting of Lough Lugh within the funerary and ceremonial landscape of Uisneach and its associated mythology and place-name evidence suggest that Lough Lugh was a place of cultural, and probable sacral, significance in the early medieval period, if not indeed earlier." (McGinley, Seamus, Aaron P. Potito, Karen Molloy, Roseanne Schot, Ingelise Stuijts, and David W. Beilman. “Lough Lugh, Uisneach: From Natural Lake to Archaeological Monument?” The Journal of Irish Archaeology 24 (2015): 126-7. httsps://www.jstor.org/stable/90017262.)
It is possible that excavation might one day reveal the lake's role as a ritual site where votive depositions may have been made, perhaps analagous to the King's Stables in Co. Armagh.