The last physical trace, described in the Ordnance Survey Letters of 1840 as 'a small portion of a stone wall with a circular doorway of chiselled limestone on it', was pulled down in 1806 to clear ground for a Roman Catholic chapel. Nothing of the original structure now survives above ground.

The friary was founded in either c. 1291 or 1300, the sources disagree, and the Butler family are credited with its establishment. The Butlers were among the most powerful of the Anglo-Norman dynasties in Munster, and their patronage of religious houses in Tipperary was extensive. The friary followed the Carmelite order, a mendicant order with origins in the Holy Land whose Irish houses multiplied from the late thirteenth century onward. By the time of its dissolution in the sixteenth century, the complex had shrunk considerably; its possessions were catalogued as a church, a chapter-house (the room where the community met for daily readings and governance), three chambers, a stable, and two gardens, all described as ruinous. These were granted to the Earl of Ormond in 1557. A Civil Survey conducted between 1654 and 1656 still noted an 'old ruinous aby' on the site, suggesting the walls had not yet entirely vanished. The Carmelites were not wholly gone either; Thurles appears among listed Irish Carmelite houses around 1737, indicating the friars returned intermittently even after formal suppression. The first Catholic Archbishop's house in Thurles was later built near the ruins by James Butler (1692 to 1774), a proximity that keeps the Butler name curiously close to the site across several centuries.

The textual record of the friary's decline is itself slightly unreliable. Writing in 1795, Topographia Hibernica described a tower still standing and part of the cross aisle to the north. Richard Pococke recorded similar details, and John Davis White repeated almost exactly the same description in 1892, close enough in wording to suggest he was copying Pococke rather than describing what he had actually seen. It is a small reminder that the history of vanished buildings is often as much about who read what as about what was actually there.