What remains is a low, roughly circular rise in the ground, around twenty metres across, sitting in the older western half of the burial ground. Local tradition holds that this subtle swelling in the earth marks where the religious house once stood, though no walls, no carved stonework, and no documentary foundation survive to confirm it.

The earliest written note of the place comes from John O'Donovan, the nineteenth-century scholar who travelled Ireland for the Ordnance Survey in the 1830s, recording place names and local knowledge before they could be lost. Writing in 1838, he noted that the burial ground in Bunnafinglas was said to have once been the site of an abbey, and that it was at the time the most frequently used burying place in the entire parish. That combination, a living graveyard grown up around a vanished religious foundation, is not unusual in Ireland, where monastic enclosures were often reused as burial grounds for centuries after the communities that built them had dispersed or been dissolved. What is quietly striking here is how little has hardened into fact. The abbey exists in the conditional tense: it is said there was one, it may have been here.