The green man motif appears across medieval ecclesiastical stonework in Ireland and Britain, usually lurking in decorative margins, but here he occupies a prominent external position on a Carmelite chapel window in south Tipperary, paired with the very image the building was dedicated to honouring. The tracery between them has long since fallen out.

The foundation at Ardfinnan in the diocese of Lismore was projected in 1314, though the surviving fabric of the nave, chancel, five-storey crossing tower, and Lady's Chapel to the south of the chancel dates to the mid to late fifteenth century. A crossing tower is a tower built at the intersection of nave and chancel rather than at the west end of a church, and here it rises five storeys on four squared pillars, its pointed vault still carrying two carved bell-rope holes at the apex. The institution's end came not through the Dissolution alone but through scandal: in 1537, the heads and commoners of Clonmel presented a finding that the Prior was living in open immorality and that no divine service was being held, despite the office being endowed to the extent of a ploughland. The abbey was closed and its property confiscated in April 1539 under Henry VIII. By the mid-eighteenth century it was no longer recorded as an active house.

The ruins sit on a north-east-facing slope at the north-east end of a ridge, in pasture land. The church is built of roughly coursed limestone rubble, and a number of architectural fragments remain in the graveyard, including a medieval door jamb that has been reused as a step at the graveyard entrance. Inside the chancel, a worn sandstone head with a long neck projects in high relief above the east window, the figure possibly wearing a tonsure. Small aumbries, shallow wall recesses used to store liturgical vessels, survive at the east ends of both chancel walls, and a piscina set within one of them would once have been used for draining water after the ritual washing of the chalice.