The peninsula juts into Clew Bay, and the combination of Atlantic weather, thin soils, and relative isolation means that medieval and early Christian remains here have often been left to their own quiet deterioration, without the interventions that have tidied up more accessible sites elsewhere in Ireland.

The ruins are recorded as an abbey, though the precise history of the foundation, including its date of establishment, the order that occupied it, and the circumstances of its abandonment, remains to be fully documented. Abbeys in the west of Ireland were frequently founded by Augustinian or Franciscan communities during the medieval period, and many were suppressed during the sixteenth-century dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII, after which buildings fell into gradual ruin or were converted to other uses. Whether any of that general pattern applies here is a question the physical remains may help answer, but the details specific to Corraun are not yet in the public record in any accessible form.