What makes it stranger still is that the first of those buildings was assembled partly from the rubble of the medieval Augustinian friary it replaced, only to be burned to the ground within a decade of opening.

The sequence begins in 1669, when a royal charter granted Erasmus Smith, a London merchant and philanthropist who endowed several schools across Ireland during this period, what the original document describes as 'several parcells of abby land, with the old abby, in Tipperary,' to be held 'to ye uses of his charity.' That charity was the founding of a free grammar school. Construction began in 1680, using stone salvaged from the demolition of the old abbey itself. The school barely had time to settle. In 1690, during the Williamite Wars, the building was requisitioned as a military headquarters by Williamite forces; the following year it was burned down. A replacement was completed by 1702, and that late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century structure lasted more than a hundred years before being superseded by a new school in 1820. The building that stands on the site today, the Father Humphreys Memorial School, opened in 1955 and was partly constructed on the footprint of its predecessor, layering the modern institution directly onto the buried archaeology of all that came before it.