That alone would make it worth attention, but the west gable adds a stranger detail: at some point after the site was dissolved, the exterior face was rendered smooth and the ground level lowered so that the wall could serve as a hand-ball alley. The original doorway in that gable now sits 3.1 metres above the ground, its threshold stranded in mid-air, and a double bellcote added probably in the 15th century occupies the apex where a window once stood.

The site's origins reach back further than its surviving stonework suggests. A nunnery called Mainistir Brighde or Molacha Brighde is mentioned in the 5th-century Life of St. Declan, and the house has been associated with a foundation of Augustinian nuns at Moylagh, linked to St. Brigid. The Butlers, the powerful Tipperary family who dominated much of the medieval county, are recorded as having a hand in founding or re-founding the abbey in the 14th century. In 1540, as the Dissolution of the Monasteries swept through Ireland under Henry VIII, the then prioress Joan Powere surrendered the house, and it was promptly granted to Robert Butler. The following January, a jury found that the priory church had served as a parish church from time immemorial, and that the remaining buildings were required by the incoming farmer, a judgment that set the tone for what followed.

The ruins sit on a south-facing slope above an east-west valley, and the surviving complex includes the main church, an ancillary two-storey building to the northwest, and a smaller structure to the northeast whose walls have largely been absorbed into the graveyard boundary. A 1942 survey recorded traces of a cloister on the north side. Inside the church, the sandstone base of a font rests east of the south doorway. More arresting still is an ogham stone, ogham being an early medieval Irish script carved as a series of notches along a central line, which appears to have been moved here from Newcastle graveyard and repurposed as a gravemarker. The accumulation of alterations, survivals, and reuse across the site makes the ruins a layered record of the long, untidy afterlife of a dissolved religious house.