No stone marks the spot, no ruin suggests a former outline, and the ground that once held a functioning ecclesiastical community has long since been absorbed into the fabric of the city around it.

The site was a Premonstratensian cell, a small house belonging to an austere order of canons regular founded in twelfth-century France, and it was already in existence by 1235. It was most likely dependent on the Abbey of the Holy Trinity at Tuam, itself established in the opening decades of the thirteenth century. The cell was known as the Chapel of St Mary on the Hill, though its origins may have been more practical than devotional; it was reputedly founded as a hospital before its role shifted to that of a chapel. By 1451, contemporary sources describe it as nothing more than a chapel, a phrase that carries a faint suggestion of diminishment rather than flourishing religious life. By 1488 the same sources record that it had been empty and disused for a long time. Whatever community had once animated the place had already dissolved, leaving the building to stand empty on the Claddagh riverbank. The site was subsequently taken over by a Dominican friary, itself now a separate and distinct layer in the long sequence of occupation on this ground.