The pieces come from doorways, interior surrounds, and sections of cloister arcading, the cloister being the covered walkway that typically ran around an open courtyard at the heart of a medieval friary, used for prayer, study, and daily movement between buildings. Taken individually, each fragment is a modest thing; together, they suggest a community that invested care and craft in its architecture, even if almost nothing of that architecture now stands above ground.

The friary was recorded as being in existence in 1466, and its history across the following century and a half tracks the turbulence of the period with uncomfortable precision. It was suppressed in 1542, part of the broad dissolution of religious houses carried out under the Tudor crown. Suppression did not always mean immediate demolition, and the friary apparently survived physically into the later sixteenth century, only to be greatly damaged by English forces in 1568. The final act came in 1602, when Domhnal O'Sullivan Bere, the Gaelic lord whose family had long held influence across this part of Munster, took down whatever remained of the structure. Whether this was done to prevent it falling into use by enemies, or for some other reason, the sources do not say. The stones he left behind ended up where they now are, repurposed as markers in a graveyard that eventually covered the site entirely.