The designation alone raises questions. The map shows a small rectangular building, roughly ten metres by five, set within a graveyard attached to the church, yet two separate bouts of archaeological testing inside the probable enclosure boundary found nothing to confirm the site's religious origins. The nunnery, it seems, had already vanished before anyone thought to record it properly.

The antiquarian John O'Donovan, writing in the 1830s, believed this to be an early church site dedicated to St Bridget, and suggested it may have served as a chapel-of-ease, a secondary place of worship built to serve parishioners living at a distance from the principal church, in this case St Peter's in Athlone. The placename Cluain Emhain appears in a fifteenth-century document, giving the site at least a medieval paper trail. O'Donovan also noted that the low-lying landscape, flat and open as it now appears, was probably once bog island, which would have made the settlement characteristic of early Irish ecclesiastical practice, where isolation offered both protection and an air of remove from the world. The oval arrangement of stone walls and hedgerows that still encircles the cluster of houses around the church, measuring roughly two hundred metres east to west and a hundred and sixty metres north to south, traces what is likely the boundary of the original ecclesiastical enclosure, a feature common to early Irish monastic and church sites. A small fragment of a cross-slab, measuring about thirty by fifteen centimetres, was found built into the wall of the old church and is now kept in the entrance porch of the newer church nearby, a modest but tangible relic of the site's earlier life. Somewhat unexpectedly, testing roughly fifty metres outside the enclosure to the north-west did turn up evidence of metal-working, suggesting activity in the wider area even if the enclosure interior remained archaeologically quiet. St Bridget's Well lies about two hundred metres to the north-east, a detail that fits a recurring pattern in Irish sacred topography, where church, enclosure, and holy well cluster together within a short radius.