The story goes that in 1253, Basilia, wife of Stephen fitz Jordan de Exeter and daughter of the Dominican patron Myler de Bermingham, invited her father to a feast at the friary and announced she would neither eat nor drink until her husband agreed to remove the Franciscans who had been installed there and hand the buildings over to the Dominicans instead. Whether the account is entirely reliable or not, the Franciscans were duly expelled, papal permission for the transfer was obtained, and the priory was rededicated to the Holy Cross. Within a year of the Dominicans taking possession, the Annals of Loch Cé record that the monastery at Ath-lethan was entirely burned. The community rebuilt, endured the Dissolution, saw their property granted by Queen Elizabeth I to one James Garvey in 1575, and still managed to keep friars on the premises; seven were recorded there in 1756, four in 1767, and the last died sometime around 1856 to 1860.

What survives today is the church alone, its nave and chancel built in limestone in the 13th century, with a lateral aisle added contemporaneously and a transept and tower inserted during a 15th-century phase of expansion, possibly prompted by a papal indulgence of 1434 that encouraged donations. The tower itself is gone, but its chancel arch still stands, and on the corbels supporting its chamfered rib are carved two birds: a pelican at the north, shown pecking its own breast in the medieval tradition that associated this act with the sacrifice of Christ and the Eucharist, and an eagle at the south, a symbol of the Resurrection rooted in an ancient belief that eagles renewed themselves by flying toward the sun and plunging into water. The transept retains an elaborate double-light window with cinquefoil heads and tracery of sextfoils and quatrefoils arranged symmetrically, still intact in the east wall. In the chancel, beneath a four-light east window, a series of corbels may once have supported statues, and below them is a rare 15th-century reredos, an carved altarpiece designed to stand behind the altar, of the kind that almost never survives intact in Irish ruins. Centuries of burials inside the church have raised the interior ground level by as much as a metre, so that tomb niches and a cloister doorway in the south wall are now partly submerged, and the full proportions of the original interior can only be reconstructed in the imagination. Attached to the southwest end of the church, a 19th-century chapel now functions as a museum dedicated to Michael Davitt, the Land League campaigner who was born in Strade and is buried here, lending the site an unexpected double life as both a medieval monument and a memorial to one of the more consequential figures of modern Irish history.