The road, in other words, may partly be made of the monastery. What remains is the church itself, a roofless but largely intact rectangular structure of nave, chancel, and a four-storey tower rising between them, the whole thing presenting an unusually complete picture of late-medieval Dominican planning even in its stripped-down state.

The founding of the Priory of the Holy Cross is tangled in competing claims. An eighteenth-century account placed it as early as 1227, but no corroborating evidence supports that date, and the fabric of the surviving building reads as late fifteenth or early sixteenth century in character. A papal document from April 1475 offers a more grounded starting point: it records a petition to Pope Sixtus IV from the bishop of Cork and Cloyne and a Dominican friar, asking permission for a knight identified as 'John de Geraldinis, knight of Kerry' to donate to the friars an abandoned stone wall and adjacent lands in Glanworth, the town's name appearing in the document in its Irish form, Gleannwyr. The Fitzgerald family were substantial patrons of the Dominican order across Munster, and this John may have been John Caoch fitz Nicholas, the sixth Knight of Kerry. The Roche family has also been named as principal founders, and it is quite possible that both families were involved. The Fitzgeralds and the Roches moving in overlapping circles of ecclesiastical patronage would not have been unusual in fifteenth-century Munster.

The stonework repays close attention. The chancel is the earliest part of the building, and its construction sequence is still legible on the exterior walls, where a line of quoins marks the point at which work on the chancel stopped and the tower and nave began. The four-storey tower, which rises from four tall pointed arches opening in each cardinal direction, retains vaulting behind the north and south arches, built using wicker centring, a technique in which a framework of woven rods was packed with mortar and stone and later left in place, its impression still visible in the curved ceilings. The east window of the chancel, with its four round-headed lights and switchline tracery, was at some point removed to the nearby Church of Ireland building and subsequently returned. A piscina niche in the chancel's south wall, used for rinsing liturgical vessels, survives with its pointed arch and credence shelf intact.