What makes it quietly curious is not just its survival but the precision with which it was observed. When an antiquarian surveyor passed through in 1840, he recorded its dimensions down to half an inch, catalogued every window and doorway, and noted, almost as an afterthought, that there were no marks of graves about or near it. For a religious house, that absence is a little strange. The building also carried an older name, Clochnamanah, which suggests a memory of the place reaching back beyond any written record.

The friary was founded in honour of St. Francis, sometime after 1450, and belonged to the Franciscan Third Order Regular, a branch of the Franciscan movement made up largely of laypeople living under a religious rule rather than fully professed friars in the stricter sense. It sat within the parish of Caheravelly and did not survive the Dissolution. On the 4th of February 1544, the friary, along with its three acres of land at an annual rent of twelve pence, was granted to a man named Robert Browne. By that point it had been dissolved. A later inquisition, dating from somewhere between 1586 and 1590, recorded that one Gerot Baluff, son of Philip, described as a rebel, had held the house of St. Francis de Ballynabrair in the territory of Twoh-oreyn. The antiquary Thomas Westropp, writing in 1904 and 1905, added a small domestic detail: a Mr. Hunt of Friarstown, early in the nineteenth century, lifted a slab inside the church and found a large empty earthen crock concealed in a hollow beneath it. No explanation was offered then or since.

The church itself, as recorded in 1840 and again by Westropp, was in fair condition, running to just over 24 metres in length and roughly 5.8 metres wide, with walls standing around four metres high and nearly a metre thick. The east gable retains a two-light window of well-cut limestone, with round-headed divisions separated by a mullion. The west gable has a similar paired window above a doorway whose outer face leans toward the pointed style while stopping just short of it. Attached to the south wall is a later projecting wing, smaller and less refined, which contains two fireplaces and chimneys and appears to have served as a dwelling. The valley setting means the ruins sit low in the landscape, easy to overlook from any distance, which may account for how thoroughly they have been left alone.