That, in a way, is precisely the point. A convent of Augustinian nuns once existed here, founded in the twelfth century alongside an older monastic community, and the ground has since swallowed every trace of it.

The site at Annaghdown has a long ecclesiastical history. The original monastery is traditionally attributed to St Brendan of Clonfert, the sixth-century abbot and voyager whose name attached itself to several foundations across the west of Ireland. By the twelfth century the community had adopted the rule of the Canons Regular of St Augustine, and at around the same time a separate convent of Arroasian Augustinian nuns was established nearby. The Arroasian congregation, which took its name from the abbey of Arrouaise in northern France, spread rapidly through Ireland during this period as part of a broader reform of Irish monasticism along continental lines. The nunnery at Annaghdown appears not to have lasted long; it seems to have failed before the century was out. There is a possibility, noted by Killanin and Duignan, that the site was subsequently revived as a house of Premonstratensian Canons, a separate order of regular clergy, sometime before 1224. Whether the women's community was dissolved into that arrangement or simply disappeared is not recorded.

What remains is essentially a gap in the landscape. No walls, no foundations, no carved stone mark where the convent stood. Annaghdown does retain other medieval fabric nearby, but the nunnery itself has left nothing visible at the surface, a reminder that a great deal of medieval religious life in Ireland has vanished not through dramatic destruction but through the quiet accumulation of centuries.