No walls break the surface, no carved stonework announces itself, and a visitor walking the ground would find nothing obviously amiss. What survives instead is a tradition: that somewhere to the east of the old church, a small abbey once stood, known in Irish as An Mainistir, meaning simply "the monastery".

The source for this tradition is the Ordnance Survey Letters, a remarkable series of nineteenth-century antiquarian notes compiled as part of the great mapping project that swept across Ireland in the 1830s. The passage recorded by O'Flanagan, published in 1927, is described as somewhat convoluted, but the substance is clear enough: local people could point to the approximate spot where they believed the foundations of a small abbey lay, just to the east of the graveyard at Bweeounagh. Whether those foundations were still faintly visible at the time of the original survey, or whether the tradition had already outlasted any physical trace, is not entirely certain. By the time the site was examined more recently, no surface evidence remained at all.