No arch, no wall, no floor tile remains visible above ground. What makes the site quietly peculiar is how completely one religious structure has swallowed another across the centuries, leaving almost nothing behind except a handful of carved stones and a tangle of overlapping place-names and traditions.

The friary, known historically as 'Caltra' or 'Kaltraghne-Pallice', was founded around 1320 by the Berminghams, barons of Athenry, a powerful Anglo-Norman family whose influence reached across much of east Connacht. It was dedicated to the Virgin Mary and housed a community of Carmelite friars, an order that arrived in Ireland during the thirteenth century, originally from the slopes of Mount Carmel in the Holy Land. The house was apparently dissolved by 1589, caught up in the suppressions of the Reformation, though it was listed around 1737 as among those convents which had since been restored. Adding another layer of complexity, local tradition preserved in the Ordnance Survey Letters records a claim that the site was once home to a nunnery called Mainisteair na Cealtraighe, and that the wall of the later parish chapel originally belonged to that earlier foundation. Whether this reflects a genuine dual history or a confusion between institutions, the ground itself no longer offers any clear answer. The first edition of the six-inch Ordnance Survey map marks the spot only as 'Grave Yard', with the additional notations 'RC Chapel' and 'Vault' nearby, none of them pointing unmistakably to what lay beneath.

The most tangible evidence that something medieval once stood here survives not in the church building itself but in the graveyard alongside it. A number of architectural fragments have been recorded from the site, among them pieces of tracery and the head of an ogee window, that distinctive S-curved Gothic form common in late medieval Irish ecclesiastical architecture. These stones almost certainly originated in the friary, displaced and forgotten as the ground was reused across the generations.