The Irish name, Kill-Finnawn, was understood by local people not as a reference to the townland of Finnan but as the church of Saint Finnan himself, and the site retained that association long after the structure itself had gone. By 1850, some remains of the church and the earthen rampart enclosing it were still discernible, but they did not survive long after that.

The historian William Carrigan, writing in 1905, recorded what happened with considerable frustration. James Hendricken, the tenant of the land around that time, removed the remaining fabric of the church and its enclosure, then compounded the damage by driving a fence and a deep drainage channel straight through the centre of the site. When Carrigan visited in 1890, human bones were visible protruding from the cut sides of that water-course, the graveyard having been effectively sliced open. A holy well was also said to have stood within the enclosure, a detail that suggests the site may have functioned as a small devotional complex rather than simply a burial ground. The name "Monastery" implies some tradition of religious community here, though no structural evidence of that survives. A further blow came in 1961 to 1962, when the thirty-acre field was drained under a national Land Project Scheme, an initiative that reshaped agricultural land across Ireland in the post-war decades. Neither the church nor the graveyard appears on any edition of the Ordnance Survey maps, and fieldwork in 1987 was needed simply to confirm where the site had been. Today, the pasture gives no indication at ground level that anything is there at all.