Walk inside, however, and you find eighteenth- and nineteenth-century headstones arranged around the perimeter walls, the stonecutters Denis Cullen and James Byrne among those represented. The open ground at the centre gives nothing away. Beneath the grass, or rather absent from it entirely, lies the footprint of a Dominican friary that once held a church, a belfry, a chapter-house, a dorter (the communal sleeping hall of a religious house), a hall, three chambers, a store, and a kitchen. Not a course of masonry survives above ground.

The friary of the Holy Cross was founded in 1264 by Thomas Theobald FitzWalter, who was buried there in 1285. In 1414 the pope granted an indulgence to the faithful who visited or donated alms for the upkeep of the church on a long calendar of feast days, an arrangement that was essentially a fundraising mechanism dressed in the language of spiritual reward. The friary was suppressed in 1539 during the Dissolution of the Monasteries, and on 27 January 1541 a local jury convened at Arklow to take stock of what remained. Their inventory is a peculiarly vivid document: six cottages were recorded as waste, destroyed by the war and rebellion of those described as "le Kavaners", a reference to the Cavanagh family of Leinster. Each tenant of a messuage had formerly been obliged to give the friars three and a half gallons of beer from every commercial brew, along with one hen annually; the jury noted that this duty was no longer being rendered. The entire property, with its fifteen acres, four messuages, and six cottages, was valued at just under thirty shillings. Edmund Duff, a gentleman, held the site on lease at a rent of twenty shillings a year. By 1544 the land had passed to John Travers of Dublin for the sum of £41. A parish church was subsequently built on part of the site, granted for that purpose by Sir Laurence Esmond and Benjamin Mountney, but that building too fell into decay, and a replacement was erected elsewhere. Parts of the original church and claustral buildings were still standing in the mid-eighteenth century. Stephen O'Kelly, recorded as the last representative of the Dominican order in Arklow, died shortly after 1835.