What prompted archaeologists to look carefully was not a grand surviving structure but something more modest and functional: a linear kiln, a type of elongated firing structure used for industrial processes such as drying grain or burning lime, uncovered to the south of where a medieval church once stood. It was found alongside two phases of stake-holes and two stone-packed post-holes, suggesting repeated use over time. That a working kiln once operated in the shadow of a friary church is the kind of detail that tends to get lost when the buildings themselves disappear.

The friary in question was founded in 1267 and belonged to the Franciscans, whose church stood just outside the eastern part of Limerick's town wall. After its dissolution, which took place between 1540 and 1548, the buildings fell gradually into ruin. Whatever remained above ground was cleared when the county courthouse was constructed on the same site around 1732, with the old church walls actually pressed into service as foundations for the new building. That courthouse was itself demolished in the mid-twentieth century, leaving the site as a layered puzzle. When Florence Hurley carried out excavations here in 1996 under licence No. 95E0218, ahead of construction work for the Northern Relief Road, twelve trenches were opened and archaeological material appeared in eight of them. The finds spanned five phases, from pre-friary organic deposits over a metre and a half deep, containing animal bone and sherds of local and imported medieval pottery, through to the friary itself, where a 13-metre section of the southern aisle wall survived with five blind arches, each roughly 1.5 metres wide. A column base for a compound pier, essentially the architectural foot of an internal support column, was found virtually intact, preserved by having been buried within a later wall.

The site lies along St. Francis Street in Englishtown, the older of Limerick's two medieval districts, near Long Lane to the south. There is nothing to see at street level now; the excavation was carried out in advance of road construction, and the Northern Relief Road has since been built across the area. What the site offers is more for the imagination than the eye: the knowledge that somewhere beneath the tarmac, the faint outline of a thirteenth-century nave, 8.5 metres wide, and a southern aisle 4.5 metres across, still exists in the subsoil, along with the kiln that once fired beside it.