That soldier, John Stevens, was marching with his regiment toward Athlone during the final campaign of the Williamite War, and what he recorded at this friary on the east bank of the Shannon was a community clinging on against considerable odds, already centuries old and already, in some sense, perpetually in the process of rebuilding.

The friary on this low hill at Friarsland, close to the site of the medieval borough of Meelick, was certainly in existence around 1414, and was probably founded by one Braswell O'Madden. By 1445, Pope Eugenius IV saw fit to grant an indulgence specifically for its repair, which suggests the building was already struggling. The Dissolution of the Monasteries in the sixteenth century left it ruinous, but the friars returned repeatedly, patching and rebuilding through the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A doorway in the north wall of the church carries a fire-damaged Latin inscription, partly legible, that appears to record one such rebuilding: the surviving fragments read something like "the Friars Minor began... the monastery... in the year of the Lord 16 —", the rest destroyed by the scorching that warped the stone. The church itself, a long narrow rectangle of roughly 35 metres by 7.5 metres, is still in use today, its west gable retaining the original doorway and a seventeenth-century round-headed window of three lights above it. The south wall bears two blocked arches midway along its length, with a carved effigy of St Francis inserted between them, thought to have come originally from a decorated tomb or from the cloister arcade. To the north, the ruins of outbuildings survive, one labelled "Convent Chapel" and another "Friars Ho." on the 1838 Ordnance Survey map; these two-storey shells are quite possibly the thatched cabins Stevens described, by then rendered in stone on the cartographer's sheet if not in his memory.

The graveyard lying to the south and east of the church contains a collection of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century graveslabs and wall plaques, several still legible. For a visitor with an eye for inscriptions, the worn Latin on the north doorway lintel rewards close attention, as does the St Francis effigy, quietly occupying its niche between those blocked arches as though it has always been there, which, in one sense or another, it has.