The buildings are entirely gone, though a handful of fragments remain, and when a well-meaning visitor in the early nineteenth century installed a Gothic window to evoke the vanished abbey, the writer and antiquarian Ryan was withering in his response, dismissing it as a "spurious, illegitimate piece of imitation" and a "profane intrusion" on ground where it might deceive future enquirers. The window appears to have made no lasting impression on the archaeology, but Ryan's indignation has survived rather better.

The friary was founded in 1314 by Simon Lumbard and Hugh Talun, who gave a house and three acres of land in what was then called "the village of St John adjoining Tullow" to a community of Augustinian friars. By 1542, the complex had grown to include a church and belfry, a dormitory, a hall, three chambers, and a kitchen, and the friars also held six cottages in the town. The Down Survey map of 1657 still shows the abbey standing on the south bank of the Slaney, alongside a tuck mill to its south-east, a tuck mill being a fulling mill used to finish woollen cloth. Within decades, however, the buildings were being quarried for construction materials, and by the reign of Queen Anne (1702 to 1714) they had been taken down entirely. What the graveyard does preserve points to an older occupation still. A bullaun stone, a large basin-shaped hollow cut into a boulder and associated with early Christian and pre-Norman religious sites, survives alongside a holy well and the head of a high cross, broken from its shaft. These together suggest the Augustinians in 1314 were not founding a new place of worship so much as inheriting one.

The graveyard lies south of Tullow town on the south side of the Slaney. The detached head of the high cross and the holy well are set into the eastern wall of the enclosure, roughly twenty-five metres north of the precise abbey site as marked on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map. In the western part of the graveyard, window mullions from the destroyed friary building lie on the surface beside a possible cross base, which is a low stone platform that would once have supported a standing cross. They are easy to miss but worth looking for.