Almost nothing of it survives in the written record, and what little does survive is fragmentary enough to make the place feel more like a rumour than a ruin. The site sits somewhere near the top of a steep slope, its location pinned down only by a single marking on the 1940 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, itself derived from a partial survey carried out in 1607 to 1608.

That early seventeenth-century survey, cited by the historian Philip Herbert Hore in his multivolume work published between 1910 and 1911, contains the sole documentary reference to the hospital. Leper hospitals in medieval Ireland were typically modest institutions, often established by monastic communities or civic bodies on the margins of settlement, precisely the kind of liminal geography that a steep riverine slope would have provided. The site appears to lie within or close to a ringwork, a type of defensive enclosure formed by a circular earthen bank and ditch, which may suggest earlier occupation of the ground before any hospital was established there. Writing in 1816, William Shaw Mason noted that a large collection of human bones had been uncovered at Greatisland, and it is possible these came from the same location. That possibility gained a little more weight in 1979, when an investigation close to the site uncovered the burial of two adults laid within a stone compartment, a form sometimes associated with early ecclesiastical or hospital burial practice.