Workers clearing the graveyard destroyed it, and with it went the most legible piece of architectural evidence on the site. What remains is a long, roughly coursed limestone shell, around 24 metres from east to west, its north transept blocked, its interior given over to burial plots, and a vault added to the south wall at some later point. Architectural fragments still lie scattered in the collapsed rubble along the walls, but they yield little without the window that once gave them context.

The abbey was built close to the site of an Early Christian monastery said to have been founded by St. Canoc in 492. That earlier foundation is now mostly invisible at ground level, but excavations carried out by Kendrick in 1934 and 1935 uncovered the footprint of a small church dating to somewhere between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, in a field to the north of the later abbey. What made that discovery extraordinary was the number of decorated cross-slabs found there: two hundred in total, carved between roughly the eighth and eleventh centuries. Cross-slabs are flat stones incised with cross designs, sometimes accompanied by other ornamental or figural carving, and they form a significant category of early medieval Irish stonework. The Gallen collection is among the larger concentrations known, described in detail by Kendrick in 1939 and later by Lionard in 1961. A bullaun stone, a boulder with one or more deliberately hollowed basins whose precise function is debated but which frequently appears in early ecclesiastical contexts, is also recorded on the site.

The cross-slabs are displayed in the field to the north of the abbey, on the excavated church site. The setting is unassuming, a slight rise with a river to the east, and the scale of what was found here in the 1930s sits oddly against the plainness of what is visible now. The ruined church itself continues in use as a burial ground, which means the site retains a certain active, layered quality even in its dilapidation.