Set on high ground and wrapped in a working graveyard, the remains represent what appears to be the southern end of a cloister arcade, that covered walkway which would once have connected the main rooms of a monastic complex. A wall running nearly twenty metres east to west still carries two round-arched openings, their wicker-work centring still visible; wicker centring is the temporary framework of woven branches used to support an arch during construction, and its survival here is unusual. Through the eastern opening, a two-storey room remains partly intact, its lower floor retaining traces of a vaulted ceiling, a twin ogee-headed window on the east wall, and a well-defined twin-light transitional window on the south wall, the term transitional pointing to a moment in Irish medieval architecture when Romanesque round forms were giving way to the pointed arches of Gothic style.

The abbey's origins are claimed to stretch back to St Patrick himself, though such founding legends attached easily to early Irish monastic sites and are difficult to verify. What is more firmly documented is a mention in a Papal suit in 1216, placing the site within the busy ecclesiastical politics of the early thirteenth century. The community then endured badly during the wars of 1225 to 1230, a period of intense regional conflict in Connacht, and the fabric of the building reflects several distinct phases of construction and reconstruction across its lifetime. The mixture of architectural styles visible even in the small portion that remains, round arches alongside transitional windows, hints at a long and complicated building history that the wars and their aftermath no doubt interrupted and reshaped.