What makes it quietly strange is its institutional ambiguity: the earliest documentary record dates to 1436 to 1437, but even then the question of which order actually lived here was unsettled. It appears to have been founded as a Carmelite house, with the possibility that it later passed to the Franciscans. The monastery never resolved itself into a tidy historical identity, and the ruins reflect that same elusiveness.

The church itself runs east to west, measuring roughly 26 metres long and 6.5 metres wide. Most of its walls survive, though they have been partially rebuilt over the centuries, and the original west doorway has been robbed out and blocked, leaving behind only a water font set into the south jamb of its embrasure. A second doorway towards the west end of the north wall probably once connected the church to the cloister, a rectangular garth of about 20 metres by 13.7 metres that abuts the church to the north, with a small cell tucked into its north-west corner. The claustral area itself is poorly preserved, but along its eastern side a two-storey domestic range once stood; the north and east walls of this range still rise, and two single-light ogee-headed windows, their curved pointed arches a characteristic late medieval decorative form, survive as the only intact architectural detail of any refinement. A nineteenth-century observer recorded that the east window of the church was then still a fine four-light pointed window of cut stone; by the time of later inspection, only a large ragged opening remained. About 20 metres to the south-east stands a separate rectangular structure known locally as Teampall Maol, meaning the Bare or Blunt Church, with a pointed arch doorway still intact in its west wall and robbed-out windows elsewhere. Old grassed-over field walls surround the friary on several sides, and the foundations of a large rectangular enclosure to the west-south-west were still traceable until they were levelled during land reclamation.