No wall, no foundation, no carved stone. An Augustinian friary once occupied this ground, complete with a church, chapter-house, dormitory, kitchen, stable, cemetery, and garden, and by 1958 even its last surviving fragment, a single pointed arch, had been reduced to rubble during a botched attempt to relocate it. The arch had been measured and photographed, documented with some care, and then destroyed by the very effort meant to preserve it.

The friary's origins are uncertain. Some sources place its founding within the reign of Henry III, somewhere between 1216 and 1272; others attribute it to Stephen Butler, an ancestor of the earls of Carrick-on-Suir, around 1300. What is clearer is its end. In 1539, as Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries swept through Ireland, the then prior, Donough O'Quirk, surrendered the friary to the crown. The inventory drawn up at that point listed the buildings as already ruinous and declared them of no monetary value, a conclusion that was almost certainly convenient rather than accurate: one of the jurors who made that assessment, a Dermot Ryan, subsequently acquired the property for himself. The church, which the same jurors noted had served as the parish church of Tipperary since time out of mind, did not survive much longer in any meaningful form. By the 1680s the entire complex had been demolished, its stonework carted off and reused in the construction of an Erasmus Smith Grammar School. Only the one pointed arch remained standing, its soffit rib carried on pointed corbels. Ordnance Survey letters from 1840 recorded it as roughly sixteen feet high and nearly nine feet wide, with walls over four feet thick on either side. A further survey in 1920 confirmed similar dimensions with greater precision. Then, in 1958, the attempt to move it finished the job the 1680s demolition had left incomplete.