It is the kind of site that registers as a quiet anomaly rather than a dramatic ruin, known mainly through a few trenches cut in a field and the objects that came out of them.

In February 1992, archaeologist Celie O'Rahilly undertook trial trenching in the field immediately north of the modern graveyard extension, opening two machine trenches that between them produced deposits of archaeological significance along with seventeenth-century pottery sherds. One of the cuts also yielded a Charles II copper farthing, dateable to between 1672 and 1679. The trenches happened to intersect two of three ridges running north to south across the field, and it has been suggested that these ridges may mark the footprint of a house associated with the Walsh family. According to St John D. Seymour's 1907 account, the Walshes acquired the lease on the Abbey Owney lands in 1562, taking over a site that had originally belonged to a Cistercian community. The abbey itself, a house of that order, gave its name to the townland, and the graveyard beside which all this lies is what remains most visibly of that earlier monastic presence.

The site is not formally accessible as a heritage destination; what a visitor will find is a grassed field, a graveyard wall, and the bungalows that now occupy part of the ground. The interest lies less in what is visible above the surface than in the layering of occupation the soil records, from monastic lands leased out at the Dissolution, through the centuries of the Walsh tenure, to the farthing that ended up in the earth during the reign of Charles II. The north-south ridges in the field, if they can still be traced, are the closest thing to a physical trace of the house itself.