She wears a horned headdress and a collared robe, and traces of her original paint, blue and gold, are still faintly visible in the stonework. It is an unexpectedly intimate detail in a building that has otherwise been through centuries of dissolution, leasing, repurposing, and slow collapse. More striking still is what the south wall of the complex has become: the rendered face of a handball alley, with medieval corbels still projecting from it about two metres above the ground.

The priory was founded as a house of Augustinian canons sometime in the twelfth century, though its history is tangled. By 1401, the Calendar of Papal Letters was recording alms being gathered for repairs to a friars preachers church at Lorrha, suggesting Dominican involvement alongside or instead of the original canons. In 1552, during the Edwardian dissolutions, a lease was granted to John Hogan, described as the late prior of Lorrowe in Lower Ormond, covering both the Augustinian priory site and a Dominican monastery, along with a parcel of land known as Friars Rath. Despite all of this, a prior of Lorrha was still being mentioned in 1599, and it appears the Augustinian friars, a distinct order from the earlier canons, took possession of the site in 1643. What survives today are the poorly preserved remains of a fifteenth-century priory, roughly 32 metres east to west and just under 9 metres north to south, built in limestone rubble with well-cut dressed quoins. A possible two-storey sacristy with a barrel-vaulted ground floor protrudes from the northeast angle, capped with a stone chimney stack. Three medieval limestone graveslabs lie at the east end of the interior. In the 1880s, a piscina with credence, a wall niche used for washing liturgical vessels, was removed from the church entirely and shipped to the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Minneapolis, where it presumably remains.