It is the kind of thing most people walk past without a second glance, yet it may be the surviving fabric of a priory that was old even before the Tudors dissolved it.

A Franciscan priory had been established on this site by 1260, though the ground itself may have been in religious use even earlier. The site is thought to have originally belonged to the Knights Hospitallers, a military-religious order that controlled considerable property across medieval Ireland, who granted it to the Franciscans. The priory was dedicated to Saints John and Bridget, and by the time of its suppression in 1541, it sat just outside the town walls along what is now Mary Street. A post-suppression inquisition carried out in 1543 recorded the remains as including a house, chapterhouse, belfry, dormitory, hall, kitchen, and various other structures, suggesting a complex of some scale even in ruin. What the Reformation left standing, the town walls largely finished off: in the 1640s, the buildings were substantially demolished to provide material for repairing Wexford's fortifications. The Franciscans returned to the site from the late seventeenth century, and the church they built, or rebuilt, is understood to incorporate walls from the medieval structure. That possible base-batter on the east wall is the most tangible surviving clue.

The site has an additional layer of confusion worth noting: it is regularly mixed up with the location of St John's Church, a separate medieval site in the same town. The two are distinct, though the shared dedication to Saint John across the centuries has done nothing to help keep the histories straight.