There are no stones to see, no arch or gable to photograph, only tarmac and parked vehicles. Yet the Ordnance Survey maps of 1839 and 1840 marked the spot in gothic lettering, the traditional cartographic shorthand for antiquities, labelling it plainly as a monastery in ruins, set at the bottom of a south-to-north valley with the Maudlin River running roughly seventy metres to the east.

The monastery label may not tell the whole story. Writing around 1840, the scholar and place-name specialist John O'Donovan noted the existence of a surviving wall at the site, which he described as a monastery, but the etymology of the townland name points towards a different kind of institution entirely. Maudlins derives from Mary Magdalene, a dedication that in medieval Ireland and Britain was commonly attached to leper hospitals, places sited deliberately at the margins of towns and kept at a careful remove from the general population. The site was known locally as St. Magdalen's, which reinforces the association. A 13th-century leper hospital here would not be implausible. There is, however, a complication: the leper hospital of Rosse, associated with this part of Wexford, has been separately identified as having stood on what was then called Durbard's Island in the River Barrow and Nore, a place now known as Great Island. Whether Maudlins was a related foundation, an earlier or later one, or an entirely separate institution remains unresolved.