The town was on the southern bank of the King River, on the eastern lower slopes of Mount Jukes, below the West Coast Range.

[5] At the turn of the twentieth century, the township had had a smelter and railway connection with the North Mount Lyell mine.

The most iconic photograph is that found in Geoffrey Blainey's The Peaks of Lyell, dated 1902, which was taken from the embankment just east of the railway line, looking west, up the main street with the smoke from the smelter in the air, and Mount Jukes in the background.

[12] During the building of the King power development in the 1980s, the Hydro Crotty Camp was home to several hundred dam construction workers[13][14] In the 1990s the townsite was inundated by Lake Burbury after Crotty Dam was installed as a part of the King River Power development scheme.

On the eastern shores of Lake Burbury, the land south of the Lyell Highway, and adjacent to the Franklin-Gordon Wild Rivers National Park, is known as the Crotty Conservation Area.