The abbey appears on Ordnance Survey maps from 1837 and 1914, so it was known to cartographers within living memory of those surveys, yet nothing of it survives to see. The church fares only slightly better: grass-covered foundation lines mark portions of the south wall, running about five metres, and the east wall, at just over two metres, set towards the crest of a south-facing ridge that runs west-northwest to east-southeast.

The place was already old when it appeared as Clonard in the ecclesiastical taxation of Elphin in 1306, a diocese-wide assessment of church revenues in what is now County Roscommon. By that point it was an established parish with enough income to be worth recording. The site carries an older social weight as well: it is traditionally associated with the Mac Dermot Gall of Airtech, a branch of one of the dominant Gaelic dynasties of Connacht, and is said to have served as their burial ground. Two stone crosses remain in the graveyard. One is a plain Latin cross in granite, half a metre tall and just over three centimetres thick, modest and worn. The other is a T-shaped cross in shale, somewhat larger at eighty centimetres high, its horizontal arms giving it a form closer to a tau cross than the more familiar four-pointed type. Both sit among the modern headstones, their age and origin unspecified but clearly distinct from the surrounding nineteenth-century stonework.