When archaeologists opened the ground here in 2008, they found a wall nearly forty metres long and almost two metres wide, the probable north wall of a church that once formed the centrepiece of a substantial religious complex. A mural passage, a vaulted ground floor suggested by a surviving column, and twenty-eight burials laid out in three neat west-east rows speak to a community of some scale. Amongst the soil came wooden bowls and utensils, an iron key, a carved wooden stylus, and pottery from as far as Saintonge in south-west France and Bristol, alongside locally made wares. A cannonball turned up in the garden soils at the south-west corner, a detail that sits quietly against the rest of the finds without any obvious explanation.

The friary was founded by the townspeople of Drogheda during the reign of Edward I, somewhere between 1272 and 1307, and was enlarged after 1309. The Carmelites, an order of mendicant friars who trace their origins to Mount Carmel in the Holy Land, dedicated it to the Blessed Mary of Mount Carmel; by 1467 to 1468 it was being referred to as St Mary the Virgin. Its end came at the Dissolution: by 1540 it was described as already thrown down, and its nine acres of property, comprising an orchard, a garden near the Boyne, and a messuage in the dale (a messuage being a dwelling with its adjoining land), passed eventually to Drogheda Corporation in 1557. The friars made a brief return to the town in the 1640s, though their old house was long gone to other uses. The Newcommen map of 1657 still marks the site as a rectangular walled enclosure labelled Abbey Park, and as late as 1718 the area was known locally as fryars park or meadow. By the time the Ordnance Survey recorded it in 1835, it had become an orchard and formal garden behind houses on March Road, the ecclesiastical memory reduced to a pleasant patch of cultivated ground.