The abbey is not a ruin in the conventional sense, with picturesque walls rising above a field. It is, more accurately, a landscape of absences: a graveyard that may partly overlie the church, a low terrace in a field to the south that could be the remains of a precinct wall, and a two-storey tower nearby that has been variously identified as a monastic residential building, a Walsh family house, and a mausoleum. Two fish weirs survive in the river to the south, possibly the abbey's own. A sketch by the traveller Thomas Dineley, made sometime between 1675 and 1680, records what was still partially standing then; by the time the Ordnance Survey visited in 1841, even that was largely gone.

The monastery was founded in 1205 by Theobald Walter, Butler of Ireland, for a colony of monks brought from Furness in Lancashire. It was dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary and known variously as Mainistir Uaithne, Abbey Woney, or Abbey Owney, that last name deriving from the Uaithne territory in which it sat. The Cistercians, a reforming monastic order that favoured austere buildings and remote river valleys, held the site for over three centuries. In 1540, following the Dissolution of the Monasteries, a royal charter transformed it into a secular provostry, with the last abbot, John Ryane, appointed provost. A 21-year lease followed in 1552, and by 1562 the site had passed by royal grant to Peter Walsh of Grange, County Kilkenny, along with a sprawling portfolio of rectories across Limerick, Tipperary, Carlow, and Kerry. When Dineley visited in the late 17th century, he noted a roofless chapel at the west end with a monument of black marble belonging to the Walsh family, dated 1619, and inscriptions in Roman capital letters beside the high altar commemorating the O'Mulryans, the Gaelic family who had dominated the surrounding territory before their lands were confiscated around 1600.

The site today sits on a slight rise just south of a medieval parish church and its graveyard, with the Mulkear River and a 17th-century six-arch stone bridge visible to the south. Archaeological trial trenching carried out by Celie O'Rahilly in February 1992 recovered 17th-century pottery and a Charles II copper farthing dated to between 1672 and 1679, but the abbey's own fabric has proved elusive. A resistivity survey the same year found nothing further. The small tower just south-west of the graveyard, labelled "Convent" on the 1840 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, retains punch-dressed stonework consistent with a 16th-century date; whether it began as part of the abbey or was built afterwards by the Walshes remains uncertain. The field-drains found during later excavations appear to be connected not with the monastery but with Famine Relief works, a reminder that the land here has absorbed several centuries of upheaval at once.