The order was famously drawn to fertile river valleys, yet here, five miles west of Kinvara on the southern shore of Galway Bay, a community of monks settled in terrain that appears at first to offer nothing but rock. The abbey's Latin name, Petra Fertilis, meaning fertile rock, quietly acknowledges the paradox; the land was harder to work than it looked, but not as barren as first impressions suggest. There is no stream beside the buildings, so the monks likely depended on local springs, and a holy well known as Tober Sheela survives within what was once the walled garden.

The site was founded in 1194 to 1195 by a colony from Inislounaght abbey in Tipperary, with the endowment coming from either Donal Mór O'Brien, king of Thomond, or his son Donough Cairbreach. The church, which runs forty metres east to west, was built between 1210 and 1225 as a scaled-down version of the standard Cistercian plan, with a single chapel off each transept rather than the usual row. The eastern end is where the builders clearly concentrated their finest effort. The presbytery, the area reserved for the clergy, is covered by rib vaulting in two bays, the diagonal ribs dressed with a triple roll moulding and the transverse arch between the bays cut with a deeply undercut herringbone chevron that has been compared to work at the Lady Chapel in Glastonbury. The carved capitals and decorated stonework at the east end are associated with what scholars call the school of the west, a regional tradition of ambitious Romanesque and transitional ornament. Evidence of wicker centring, the temporary framework of woven rods used to support an arch during construction, is still visible in the chapel off the south transept. Sometime around the famines of 1227 to 1228, the quality of construction dropped sharply in the nave, and the asymmetry of the surviving arches raises doubt about whether a north aisle was ever finished at all. The community remained small and, by the later medieval period, extremely poor. An inserted wall eventually shortened the church, and upper walls and roofs were remodelled. In 1554, the dissolved abbey was granted to Murrough O'Brien, earl of Thomond, returning the site to the same family that had founded it more than three centuries earlier.

Inside the church, several details reward close attention. A sedile, the recessed seat set into the wall where a celebrant would rest during the Mass, survives with its pointed arch, foliate capitals, and blind arcading on the rear wall. The effigy of King Conor na Suidane O'Brien, who died in 1267 and was the grandson of the founder, lies within, alongside an effigy of a bishop. Less obviously, on the north wall of the chancel, someone scratched a Viking-type ship into the plaster, a small and unexplained detail that sits oddly in an otherwise conventional monastic interior. The presbytery and south transept were re-roofed by the Office of Public Works in 2006, offering some protection to the finest stonework that survives.