That ambiguity is, in its own way, the whole story. On the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, a small rectangular structure is marked and labelled "Abbey (in ruins)", which sounds authoritative enough. The trouble is that the ground itself has never cooperated with the label.

When the antiquarian Patrick Power visited the site in 1932, he noted some vague, "nondescript remains" but concluded that evidence was "entirely wanting" that they belonged to an abbey at all. His caution was well placed. The standard scholarly reference works on medieval Irish religious houses, compiled by Aubrey Gwynn and R. Neville Hadcock, do not include Mountcatherine in their catalogue of monasteries and priories, which is a significant omission. Gwynn and Hadcock were methodical in their coverage, and the absence of a site from their listings generally means there is no reliable documentary or physical basis for a religious foundation there. Whatever the 1842 cartographers believed they were recording, or whatever local tradition prompted the name, it has not been possible to verify it. Today the field is level pasture with no visible trace of any structure at all.

What remains, then, is a cartographic ghost: a ruin that may never have been a ruin of what it claimed to be, on a map that recorded a name without, apparently, anyone pressing too hard on the question of whether the name was earned. The site sits somewhere in that uncomfortable gap between local memory, early mapping practice, and the harder demands of archaeological evidence.