Established in 1291 on land purchased from a local burgess named John Bluet, the new community almost immediately ran into trouble with the bishop of Limerick, who had the friars ejected and their buildings levelled. An inquiry followed, and the outcome was a compromise of sorts: the Dominicans were permitted to start again, but on a new site across the River Loobagh, outside the walls of the town rather than within reach of episcopal oversight.

What they built on that second, riverside site turned out to be considerably more substantial than a chastened community might have expected. The thirteenth-century nave and chancel church was extended over the following two centuries, gaining a south transept and western aisle in the fourteenth century and a narrow crossing tower, inserted between nave and chancel, sometime in the fourteenth or fifteenth century. A sedilia, the row of recessed seats used by clergy during Mass, runs six bays along the south wall of the chancel, and the north wall carries a cusped ogee-headed tomb niche decorated with nail-head ornament and carved heads. The chancel windows are particularly fine: a graduated five-light east window with banded shafts, and six twin-light windows along the south wall with switch-line tracery, a form of interlocking geometric pattern common in later medieval Irish church building. A c. 1600 map of the town, now held in Trinity College Dublin, shows the friary sitting within a rectangular water-filled precinct fed by the Loobagh, with a cluster of houses to the north and two watermills on the east bank that probably belonged to the community. A small bridge and the Friar's Gate connected the precinct to the walled town. The friary was suppressed in 1541, when jurors recorded a two-acre site containing a church, cemetery, cloister, dormitory, and other buildings.

Kilmallock itself lies in south County Limerick, and the friary ruins sit just outside the medieval town walls. The remains are substantial enough to reward a careful look around: the five-light east window is largely intact, and the corbels carrying carved faces at the crossing arches are easy to miss if you move through the transept quickly. The cloister ranges to the north and east are considerably more ruined, but their footprint is legible. The site is a national monument, designated No. 212, and is generally accessible to visitors.