The cloister, a covered walkway enclosing a central courtyard that would have been the quiet heart of monastic life, can now be traced only by overgrown foundations, the outline of its roughly twenty-metre-square plan just legible beneath the sod.

The abbey at Aghamanister and Spital was founded in 1172 by Dermot MacCormac MacCarthy, a member of the powerful MacCarthy dynasty that dominated much of Munster during the medieval period. The Cistercians, a reforming monastic order that had spread rapidly across Europe from their founding in Burgundy in the late eleventh century, established dozens of houses in Ireland following the order's arrival in the mid-twelfth century. This foundation was therefore an early one, planted at a moment when Cistercian influence in Ireland was still expanding. It did not remain here long, however. Sometime in the 1270s, just a century after its founding, the community relocated to nearby Abbeymahon, leaving the original site to gradually disappear into the pasture around it.

The ruins sit in ordinary farmland, with nothing to announce them from a distance. What little stonework survives is in poor condition, and the cloister foundations are largely obscured by vegetation. A visitor who knows what they are looking for, though, can read the bones of the place well enough: the arched opening in the north wall, the faint rectangular logic of the cloister enclosure, the quiet geometry of what was once a functioning monastic community before it simply picked up and moved on.