No walls, no arches, no tumbled stonework to clamber around. The site appears on nineteenth-century Ordnance Survey maps as a roofless building of modest proportions, roughly five metres by four, labelled with the familiar melancholy of the cartographer's notation: "Abbey (in Ruins)". By the time anyone thought to look carefully, even that much had gone. What the ground now offers are hillocks and mounds on a west-facing slope, with a stream running below, and the faint geometry of a former formal garden a few metres to the south.

The monastery's history, such as it can be recovered, belongs to the very early medieval period. Writing in 1905, the historian William Carrigan placed the site about a hundred and fifty yards south or south-east of the old church at Loughill, to the west of a house then known as Warren's old house. He drew on Archdall's Monasticon Hibernicum, an eighteenth-century catalogue of Irish monastic foundations, which records the place under the name Leamchuill, described as lying on the borders of Leix and Hyduach, two of the old territorial divisions of this part of Leinster. According to Archdall, St Fintan Corach served as abbot here towards the close of the sixth century. Even in the early sources his afterlife was disputed: some writers held that he was buried at Loughill, while others assigned his place of sepulture to Cluain-ednach, the monastery better known as Clonard, or alternatively to Clonfert-Brendan. A second figure, St Mochonna, is listed as abbot or bishop at Leamchuill, though no date could be attached to him even in Archdall's time. The site sits in territory where the kingdoms of Leix and Ossory once pressed against one another, which may partly explain why its early records are so thin and so contested.

The small roofless structure visible on the 1839 and the later 1899 to 1902 Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, positioned roughly sixty metres west of the former Loughill House, had left no trace at ground level by the time the site was surveyed in the modern era. The hillocks Carrigan described are the likeliest remnant, the kind of subtle earthwork that asks a patient eye and some knowledge of what to expect from early monastic enclosures in this part of Ireland.