The wall foundation there rises just sixty centimetres above ground level. Everywhere else, a gentle scarp and a few small cairns of earth and stone are the only clues that a building once stood here at all. No doorways, no window openings, no carved stonework of any kind remains in place. Twenty-five metres to the east, a large lump of crudely coursed mortared limestone sits in the grass, possibly shaken loose from the abbey itself at some point, though it lies at a remove that makes the connection uncertain.

The site sits just south of the centre of an early ecclesiastical enclosure, one of those roughly circular or oval boundaries, often still faintly legible in the landscape, that mark out the original footprint of an early Irish monastic settlement. A church or abbey placed within such an enclosure would have been the focal point of religious life for the surrounding area, though precisely when Gortnabishaun was founded or by whom is not recorded in what survives. The first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which dates from the mid-nineteenth century, still showed a small roofed rectangular building here, aligned north to south, meaning the structure was standing, or at least partly so, within living memory of the earliest systematic mapping of the Irish countryside. Gwynn and Hadcock, whose 1970 survey of medieval religious houses in Ireland includes this site, noted it among the county's ecclesiastical remains. Immediately to the south-east lies a cillin burial ground, a type of unconsecrated burial place historically used for unbaptised infants and others excluded from formal church burial, which underlines the long religious significance of this particular patch of north Galway farmland.