Religious house - Dominican friars, Aghaboe, Co. Laois

Windows salvaged from the nearby Dominican friary were inserted into its walls, and its belfry tower belongs to a thirteenth-century Augustinian priory that preceded it on the same ground. The effect is less a single building than a palimpsest, each layer pressed up against the next, with medieval carved heads still visible on the doorway and facade and a grave slab dated 1675 lying flat at the east end of the church.

The accumulation of layers here goes back a very long way. St Cainnech, also known as Canice, founded a monastery on the site before 577. It was plundered and burnt repeatedly over the centuries, and in 1172 Aghaboe was granted to Adam de Hereford by Earl Strongbow after the Norman arrival in Ireland. By 1234 the monastery had been rebuilt as an Augustinian priory. Then in 1346 the town and church were burned again, this time by Dermot MacGillapatrick. Barely a generation later, Florence MacGillapatrick, Lord of Ossory, founded a Dominican friary close by in 1382, with John O'Foelan as its first prior. A transept, known as Phelan's Chapel, was added to the west end of the south wall around 1400. The friary was suppressed in 1540. By the time a visitor described it in 1786, the western doorway still had its concentric arches, the cloister quadrangle measured sixty feet across, and the prior's apartment above the cellars ran to forty-six feet by seventeen. Even so, a previous incumbent of the parish had already begun demolishing the fabric and using the stone to enclose a demesne.

The Dominican church, which sits to the west of the Protestant church, survives as a roofless shell of rubble and limestone, roughly 32 metres long. Its east gable retains a three-light window, and inside the south wall there is an ogee-headed piscina, a shallow stone basin used in medieval liturgy for draining water from the washing of sacred vessels, with a scalloped six-leaf bowl and a central drain hole. Grass-covered foundations of the cloister are visible to the north. When excavations were carried out ahead of restoration works, coffinless burials were found layered beneath the north wall, feet pointing east in the medieval tradition, some disturbed to make room for later interments above. The site of St Canice's Well lies approximately 180 metres to the south-west.