Supposedly, because almost nothing supports the claim beyond a single scholarly reference, no physical trace survives above the surface, and nobody living nearby appears to have any memory of ruins, walls, or even a story.

The sole source for the identification is Gwynn and Hadcock's 1970 survey of medieval religious houses in Ireland, which places an early 17th-century Franciscan house at this location. The Franciscans, a mendicant order whose Irish foundations were frequently modest, rural, and sometimes short-lived, established a number of small communities in the decades around 1600, a period of considerable disruption during and after the Nine Years' War. Such houses were often built quickly, suppressed or abandoned equally quickly, and left little permanent architecture behind. That may explain what happened here, or it may be that Gwynn and Hadcock were working from a source that was itself uncertain. Either way, there is no corroborating documentary evidence, no archaeological trace visible at ground level, and no local tradition that something religious once stood on this slope above the Wicklow countryside.

What remains, then, is essentially a question mark on a map. The site is not marked by any monument, earthwork, or indicator that anything lies beneath the surface, and without excavation there is no way of knowing whether the monastery ever existed at Ballinabarny, existed somewhere nearby and was mislocated, or existed only in an error quietly passed down through the scholarly record.