There is already a Tintern Abbey, the famous ruin on the Welsh border celebrated by Wordsworth and visited by generations of tourists. But in County Wexford, on a south-facing slope above a fast-flowing river where it meets the tidal estuary of Bannow Bay, stands its lesser-known Irish counterpart, officially Tintern Minor or, in a phrase that captures its origins precisely, Tintern de Voto: Tintern of the vow. The place owes its existence not to patient monastic planning but to a moment of terror at sea, and that founding circumstances gives it a character quite distinct from the grander ruins of Irish monasticism.

In the autumn of 1200, William Marshal, earl of Pembroke and recently installed lord of Leinster, was crossing to Ireland when his ship was caught in a storm. He vowed that if he survived he would found a new abbey, and on making landfall safely at Bannow Bay he immediately granted roughly nine thousand statute acres for a Cistercian house dedicated to the Virgin Mary. The charter was formally conferred between 1207 and 1213. Marshal sent to his manor of Chepstow in Monmouthshire for the founding community, drawing monks from Tintern Major, the Welsh abbey from which the Irish foundation took its name and its dedication. The relationship between the two houses remained close, though relations with nearby Dunbrody Abbey were, by the historical record, tempestuous and often violent. Suppressed on 6th May 1536, the abbey passed through various hands before a fee-farm grant in 1576 brought it to Anthony Colclough, a member of the Lord Deputy's staff in Ireland, whose family proceeded to inhabit the monastic buildings in increasingly inventive ways. The nave was converted in the early nineteenth century into a three-storey Georgian Gothic residence; the crossing tower, a 27-metre square structure with crenellated parapets, had already been made into a six-storey fortified dwelling in 1569 or 1570, complete with limestone fireplaces and, by the early seventeenth century, oak panelling. The Colcloughs remained in residence until 1959, when the site passed to the state.

What remains today is a layered accumulation of purposes: Cistercian stonework in granite, sandstone, quartzite and shale; Dundry stone imported from near Bristol used for mouldings on the west door; blocked arcades, inserted windows, and the ghost of a Georgian drawing room within medieval walls. The medieval gatehouse survives, incorporated into a nineteenth-century stable block. Excavations in the mid-1980s and 1990s uncovered the layout of the cloister arcade and burials dating mostly to the fifteenth century, along with three preserved graveslabs. The site operates with a guided service on a seasonal basis, but the grounds and environs of the abbey can be walked throughout the year.