"Maudlin" derives from Mary Magdalene, the patron saint most commonly associated with leper hospitals in medieval Ireland and Britain, and the name was widely used to indicate a lazar house, a place of isolation and care for those suffering from leprosy. That linguistic trace is often all that survives of such institutions, and in this case it is very nearly all that remains.

The historian William Carrigan, writing in 1905, noted that a leper hospital of this kind could be taken for granted as having stood here in ancient times, though he observed that all tradition connected with it had by then already died out. Local memory proved somewhat more tenacious than Carrigan anticipated: oral tradition pointed to the southern portion of the townland as the site of the hospital, and foundations were said to still be present there well into the twentieth century. Those last physical remains were demolished sometime in the 1970s or early 1980s, leaving nothing visible at ground level.

What survives, then, is essentially a place-name and a faint thread of local knowledge. The site is not visible today, and there is little to see on a visit. But the name itself does quiet work, preserving the outline of an institution that once marked the edge of medieval settlement, where the sick were housed at a careful distance from the rest of the community, and then was gradually forgotten.