The site sits on ground surrounded by wet, boggy terrain on three sides, and what remains is not simply a ruined church but a layered complex of towers, a cloister, a refectory, a dovecot, and earthworks, the physical record of an institution that spent much of its later life trying simultaneously to pray and to defend itself.

The priory's origins lie in the aftermath of the Anglo-Norman invasion. Sometime between roughly 1180 and 1185, Hugh de Lacy granted the churches of Fore and their endowments to the Benedictine abbey of St Taurin at Evreux in Normandy, making Fore a dependent, or alien, priory of a French house. That status brought persistent difficulties. During the Hundred Years War, the English crown repeatedly seized the priory and placed it under a guardian precisely because its allegiance ran to an abbey in enemy territory. By 1340, the prior William Tessone was allocated only enough revenue to support himself and five monks, which may well have been the entire community at that point. Raids on the priory lands in 1423 and again in 1428 forced a change of character: the priors William England, who held office from 1418, and William Croys, from around 1441, are both credited with having built what contemporary documents describe as "divers castles" for the priory's defence. Parliament finally severed the connection with Evreux in 1445 and made Fore an independent house. By the time of the dissolution of the monasteries, the official extent of the priory noted that its towers and stone buildings were "very necessary for the defence of the country," a curious epitaph for a monastery. The site passed through several hands after 1540, going first to Matthew King, then Sir William Seyntlowe in 1551, and eventually to Christopher Nugent, lord of Delvin, in 1567.

The buildings reflect this complicated history in stone. The basic cloister layout dates to the early thirteenth century, but the fifteenth century left its mark heavily. The church was shortened when a residential tower was inserted at its west end, a tower whose ground-floor west wall still incorporates masonry from the original thirteenth-century gable. The arches leading to the north chapel were blocked up, the chapter room in the east range was converted into domestic apartments, and a new refectory was built immediately north of its predecessor before the older one was demolished. Inside the church, a twin-arched niche for a piscina and aumbry, a small liturgical basin and wall cupboard used in the Mass, retains traces of painted plasterwork: rectangles outlined in red-brown with red rosettes in alternating spaces, a small remnant of medieval interior decoration that easily goes unnoticed. Two cross slabs leaning against the exterior south wall of the nave are thought, from their position, to mark the burial places of two of the priory's priors.