For a ruin of moderate dimensions on a small island off the Cork coast, that is a remarkably cosmopolitan haul, and it points toward something the stones themselves only hint at: this was a place thoroughly entangled with the wider Atlantic world, its neighbours in Baltimore Harbour as likely to be traders or pirates as fishermen.

The friary was founded by Fineen O'Driscoll in 1449, though construction probably did not begin in earnest until the 1460s. The O'Driscolls were the dominant maritime family of the region, and the priory they endowed sits on a north-east-facing slope close to the shore on the eastern side of Sherkin, a position that keeps it in close relation with the sea. What survives is a church, with a nave and chancel divided by an inserted central tower, a south transept with two side chapels separated from the nave by an arcade of three pointed arches on square piers, and domestic buildings arranged around a cloister to the north. The tower, at around fifteen metres, is notably low by the standards of Franciscan architecture. A small carved vine leaf decorates the pointed terminal of one of its ribbed arches, a detail easy to miss but worth looking for. The friary was burnt in 1537 and subsequently repaired, and the buildings bear the marks of many later alterations; the ground level inside the church has risen over centuries of burials, so the original floor lies somewhere below. Excavations carried out from 1987 onwards uncovered the cloister walks, a stone-built well of probable seventeenth-century date, and a drainage system whose components spanned four centuries, from the fifteenth to the nineteenth. Immediately to the east of the friary stand the remains of a fish palace, a structure used for the processing and salting of fish, which reinforces the sense that the religious and the commercial here were never very far apart.