Today the fields to the south and east of Abbey Owney hold only grass, the occasional earthwork, and the faint traces of what archaeologists have identified as a possible house platform and hollow way, the latter a sunken track worn into the ground by centuries of foot and animal traffic. A ridge and furrow system, the corrugated evidence of medieval strip farming, may also survive in the northern part of the same field. None of this is immediately obvious from the road.

The best documentary snapshot of the settlement comes from the mid-seventeenth century. The 1654 to 1656 Civil Survey of Limerick describes a manor town with the River Mulkear running through it, a stone bridge, a mill, two fishing weirs, a demolished stone house, and two orchards. All of it was recorded as belonging to Colonel Piers Walsh, described in the survey as an Irish Papist of Abbeyoughnie. The Down Survey of 1656 adds visual detail: its barony map shows a cluster of dwellings on both the north and south banks of the Mulkear, gathered around the river crossing near the ruins of Owneybeg Abbey, and its accompanying terrier notes approximately thirty thatched houses on the manor. In 1681, the traveller Thomas Dineley sketched the Cistercian abbey ruins and included a six-arched bridge with dwellings clustered nearby. By 1795, the writer Seward was still calling Abington a fair-town, with fair days recorded for 27th May and 31st August, though a later commentator, the Reverend Seymour writing in 1907, was uncertain whether Seward meant the old medieval settlement or the more recent buildings beside the parish church.

The earthworks that survive are most legible from the air. Cambridge University aerial photographs from 1968 recorded cropmarks to the east, south, and west of the graveyard, and more recent Digital Globe imagery from between November 2011 and March 2012 shows further cropmarks to the south and south-east of the abbey. On the ground, terracing is visible to the south-east of the abbey ruins, and the possible house platform, measuring roughly 25 metres north to south and 20 metres east to west, sits in the western part of the same field. The site rewards a slow, attentive visit rather than a quick one; the relationship between the abbey, the old bridge, the mill site, and the surrounding fields only becomes apparent when read together as the remnants of a single, once-coherent settlement.