The surface of the field was once covered with small hillocks and mounds, the subsided remains of an early monastic establishment, and yet the local community had, even by the early twentieth century, preserved no tradition whatever about what once stood there. The place is unusual precisely because of that silence: physical evidence on the ground, historical traces in the landscape, and a complete absence of folk memory to explain them.

The field was known for centuries as Paurk-Philop, or Philip's Field, until 1839, when the Ordnance Survey Commissioners arrived and renamed it Awrdhawns, apparently their anglicisation of a term reflecting the undulating surface they found. Their surveyors recorded the two acres of mounds and associated them with an early monastic site. The historian William Carrigan, writing in 1905, drew on that earlier observation and noted that the south side of the field was washed by a stream, on the north bank of which dressed stonework from the original foundation could still be seen. One piece was described as the semi-circular cap of a small cut-stone window, a detail suggesting a building of some architectural ambition, however modest in scale. The field immediately across the stream carried the Irish name Macha-na-mBó, meaning the Yard of the Cows, which hints at the practical agricultural life that had long since replaced whatever devotional activity once took place nearby. Carrigan placed the site close to the old churchyard, and the earthworks he described correspond to a field roughly 200 metres to its south-west.

The stream that once ran along the southern boundary of the field has since been re-aligned and is now dry, so the landscape Carrigan described has shifted further from its original form. The earthworks themselves remain clearly defined, however, and are visible in aerial imagery. The site sits close to the old graveyard, which serves as the most practical landmark for anyone approaching the field on foot.