The rest of the Cistercian complex has gone, including the structure known as the abbot's castle, which was pulled down in 1882 so that its stone could be recycled into a rectory. That kind of pragmatic demolition was common enough in nineteenth-century Ireland, but it still leaves an odd feeling: a medieval castle dismantled to build a Victorian house of God, using the ruins of a medieval house of God.

The abbey was founded in 1148, making it one of the earlier Cistercian foundations in Ireland, at a point when the order was still spreading rapidly across Europe under the influence of Bernard of Clairvaux. The church that remains runs to roughly 56 metres in length and retains a long nave with an arcade, a choir, a presbytery, and two transepts added later. At the east end, several Romanesque carved capitals survive, the kind of decorative stonework that the Cistercians officially discouraged but which appeared in Irish houses anyway. There is also a sedilia in the presbytery, a set of recessed stone seats built into the wall where officiating clergy would sit during parts of the Mass. The west door is a two-centred granite arch, probably fifteenth century, with a three-light window above it. The crossing-tower, where the nave and transepts meet, was built during the later Middle Ages and then substantially rebuilt in 1815 in the Neo-Gothic style, giving it a slightly incongruous appearance against the older fabric around it.

The church sits about 100 metres east of the River Slaney and is accessible from the town. The mix of genuine Romanesque detail at the east end and the early nineteenth-century reconstruction of the tower gives the building an unusual layered quality, and the carved capitals repay a close look once your eyes have adjusted to the interior light.