No walls, no foundations, no trace of cut stone. The site of Cloonard Abbey appears on the six-inch OS maps of 1837 and 1914, which at least confirms that cartographers of two successive centuries considered it worth recording, but the ground itself offers no confirmation of anything. It sits just to the west of a separate church site, and that adjacency is, in practical terms, the most concrete thing that can be said about it.

The name attached to the place is Saint Aodh Fionn of Cloonard, who was said to be one of seven sons of Caol Uí Oilealla of County Sligo. He may have founded an early church here, though the conditional is doing considerable work in that sentence. His brothers may be the same group recorded in the martyrologies as the sons of Caolbhadh, commemorated on 24 April, a connection noted by the scholar Pádraig Ó Riain. Martyrologies are early medieval ecclesiastical calendars listing saints and their feast days, and they are sometimes the only thread connecting a named holy figure to a particular place. In this case, the thread is very thin indeed. What we have is a saint of uncertain biography, a possible founding, and a map designation that persists across nearly a century of surveying without any physical evidence to support it.