The label has stuck, but it is almost certainly wrong. What stands here, overlooking the Mulkear River some ninety metres to the south, is more likely the remains of a post-Reformation dwelling house, built from the salvaged fabric of a dissolved Cistercian abbey and quietly misidentified ever since.

The Cistercian house in question was Abbey Owney, whose levelled remains lie adjacent to the site. When the abbey's lands were acquired by the Walsh family in 1562, following the dissolution of the monasteries, the Walshes appear to have put the stone to practical use. The historian Seymour, writing in 1907, argued that the structure had nothing to do with the original religious community but was instead a 16th-century house built by the new landowners out of whatever the abbey had left behind. He noted, too, that the Walsh tomb had been moved into the building at some point, for reasons that are no longer clear. By 1841, when Ordnance Survey officers recorded the structure for their field letters, it was already a ruin. They measured it carefully: two rooms divided by a wall running the full breadth of the building, oriented east to west, with the eastern apartment roughly 6.1 metres by 3.3 metres and the western somewhat larger at 6 metres by 4.3 metres. The side walls still stood to about 4.8 metres and were nearly a metre thick, built from small field stones set in lime and sand mortar, with two quadrangular doorways on the south wall, each partly of brickwork.

The structure sits immediately south of the south-west angle of the Abbey Owney graveyard, which itself lies beside the Church of Ireland church at Abington. Visiting requires some patience with the layers of the site: graveyard, levelled abbey footprint, and the misnamed 'Convent' all occupy a compact area, and the relationship between them is not immediately obvious on the ground. The Ordnance Survey letters, published by O'Flanagan in 1929, remain the most precise description of what survives, and reading them before a visit helps make sense of what the walls are actually telling you.