Founded sometime after 1537 by Manus O’Donnell for the Franciscan Third Order Regular, this friary came into being during a particularly turbulent period when Henry VIII was dissolving monasteries across Ireland and Britain. Today, only fragments remain of what was once a rectangular church measuring roughly 25 metres by 6 metres internally, with its nave and chancel forming one continuous space without any structural division between them.

The surviving walls, built from roughly coursed rubble with some quarried blocks and thin horizontal pinnings, offer glimpses of the building’s former glory. The most substantial remnant is the eastern half of the south wall, which still rises to about 5 metres in height along with an attached section of the east gable. A small fragment of the west gable, barely a metre high, also endures. Within the south wall, visitors can spot a wall press at the eastern end, whilst two ragged gaps mark where windows once let light into the sacred space. The graveyard wall has been built directly onto the church’s north wall, and careful observers can still trace sections of the original church fabric in its exterior face.

The friary’s dressed stonework has had quite a journey since the building fell into ruin. When antiquarian Fagan visited in 1846, he found the walls standing considerably higher, between 10 and 25 feet, with evidence of large windows in each gable and two in the south wall, plus a door at the western end; though by then, all the cut stone had already vanished. The missing stonework wasn’t simply lost to time; much of it was recycled into other local buildings. Pieces including door and window stones, along with a mitred head, were incorporated into an old Protestant church that has since been demolished, whilst other fragments can still be seen today built into the exterior walls of the current Church of Ireland parish church nearby.