High on the west-facing crest of a north-south valley in County Waterford, the ruins at Mothel hold considerably more than their modest remains suggest. What survives of the abbey church is fragmentary: part of the west gable, a doorway set unusually high in the wall (thought to have once opened onto a tower that has since vanished entirely), and a stretch of the south wall with three windows, one of them a pointed twin-light of the kind common to late medieval religious architecture. A southern chapel or transept, now reduced to wall foundations, was originally reached through a round-headed doorway. But scattered across and around the large rectangular graveyard, which measures roughly 90 metres by 75 metres, lies a quiet accumulation of carved stone that rewards careful attention: chest-tomb panels, medieval graveslabs, a finial with a cross-socket, dressed casement stones, and a double capital with foliate decoration.

The site's history stretches back well before the medieval abbey. An early ecclesiastical foundation here is attributed to St Brogan and then St Cuan, both said to have been active in the 6th century, with St Cuan's Well surviving about two kilometres to the north-east. The Augustinian house that eventually grew up on the site may have been established before the Anglo-Norman invasion of the late 12th century, making its origins unusually deep even by Irish monastic standards. When it was dissolved in 1540, the complex was recorded as comprising a church and steeple, five chambers, a dormitory, a kitchen, a granary, and stables, a snapshot of a functioning community abruptly wound down. Among the most compelling objects still present is the decorated side panel of a chest-tomb, a type of raised altar tomb often elaborately carved, bearing an inscription commemorating Abbot Rory O'Comoyn and dated to around 1500. Elsewhere in the graveyard, a cross-slab incised with a Latin cross, and a similarly decorated pillar stone known as Cloc-na-Comirca, positioned at the entrance to a nearby farm, may belong to the earlier Early Christian phase of the site's long use. Archaeological testing in the farmyard also uncovered traces of a metalled surface, suggesting activity beyond the visible monastic footprint.