Sometime in the later medieval period, the nave of a religious house founded around 1305 was fitted with crenellations along its west wall and small corner towers at its south-west and north-west angles, transforming a place of worship into something that looked, and probably functioned, more like a fortified residence. A machicolation, a projecting parapet with floor openings through which defenders could drop stones or other material onto attackers below, sits on two corbels on the outer face of that same west gable. The entrance doorway below it has sunk so far into the accumulated ground that only the upper jambs and arch remain visible above the soil line.

The priory is thought to have been founded by Richard de Burgh around 1305, and the church was built using roughly coursed limestone blocks and greywacke, a dark, hard sedimentary rock common in the area. A central tower dividing the nave from the chancel was added later, probably in the first half of the fourteenth century, and it was designed with some ingenuity: it rises two storeys above the vault, with rectangular openings giving access to lofts over both nave and chancel, and a stairwell tucked into its south-east angle that projects slightly outward to accommodate the climb. A single limestone corbel on the tower's south wall hints at a wooden gallery that once led to the choir. Roughly twenty metres to the south stand the remains of a domestic range in two distinct phases. The earlier western portion is heavily ruined, but its gable pitch is still readable in the raised stonework of the nave's south wall. The later eastern portion was built in the manner of a tower house, with slit windows and punch-dressed quoins that speak to the same late medieval anxiety about defence that altered the nave.

The blocked windows throughout the chancel and nave, some converted to flat arches, some simply filled in, give the ruins a sealed, layered quality, as though each generation covered over the work of the last. A window in the domestic range's south gable was itself converted into a fireplace at some point, a small domestic gesture inside a building already caught between sacred and secular use.