No walls survive, no foundation stones are visible, no outline of a cloister or chapel remains above ground. The site of the Abbey of Down exists today largely as a name on the landscape, and yet the name alone is enough to confirm that something substantial once stood here.

The Abbey of Down was a house of the Augustinian Canons Regular, a religious order that followed the Rule of St Augustine and whose communities were widespread across medieval Ireland. The house is recorded as having existed at the time of the Suppression, the dissolution of the monasteries carried out under Henry VIII in the sixteenth century, which brought the formal life of countless Irish religious houses to an abrupt end. The detail comes from notes made by the antiquarian John O'Donovan around 1840, preserved in later scholarship. One physical remnant is documented: the head of an ogee-headed window, an arched window form with a distinctive S-curved profile common in late medieval ecclesiastical architecture, said to have come from the abbey site. It is now held at the County Museum in Enniscorthy. Immediately to the west of the abbey site lies an earthwork, which may speak to an older or related pattern of occupation in this same river valley.

The Enniscorthy County Museum is the most direct way to encounter any tangible trace of the abbey today. The window head there is a small object to carry so much absence with it, a single carved fragment representing what was once, presumably, an entire complex of buildings at that river junction in south Wexford.