It is the kind of arrangement that speaks to a particularly Irish relationship with ruins: they are not always abandoned so much as repurposed, inhabited in new ways long after their original function has dissolved.

The site sits within an early ecclesiastical enclosure, suggesting Christian use of the ground stretching back well before the medieval period. An ecclesiastical enclosure of this type typically marks out land that was set apart for religious purposes from an early date, often defining the boundary of a monastic or church site. By the time the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map was made in the 19th century, the abbey building was still shown as roofed, a rectangular structure roughly 15 metres by 5 metres, aligned northwest to southeast. What remains today is considerably less: two overgrown wall fragments, the western stretch running about 7.3 metres and the southern just under 4 metres, reaching a maximum height of around 2 metres and a width of roughly 36 centimetres. No carved stonework, windows, or doorways survive to give any architectural clue about when the building was constructed or what order may have used it, though Gwynn and Hadcock's survey of medieval religious houses notes the site. The Lambert family vault now occupies the interior, a domestic intrusion that effectively replaced one kind of sacred use with another.