Two earth and stone banks, separated by a fosse (a shallow defensive ditch), once defined the outer boundary, with a river curving around the southern arc to reinforce the boundary further. A possible entrance gap, some 15 metres wide, opens at the south-east. Within that outer ring there appears to have been a smaller, D-shaped inner enclosure, its outline now traced by the curve of a modern road and the ghost of a linear earthwork that runs east to west across the site before terminating abruptly behind the friary. A twelfth-century motte, a flat-topped earthen mound of the kind introduced by the Anglo-Normans as a fortification platform, sits directly on top of the eastern enclosing bank, a detail that quietly speaks to centuries of layered occupation and competing authority on the same ground.

The monastery here was founded by St Ruadhán, who died in 584 and was known as the 'lamp of Lothra'. He was the son of Fearghas Bearn of the Uí Dhuach clan from Fassadinin and Crannagh baronies in County Kilkenny, and his feast day fell on the 15th of April, when, according to tradition, the cuckoo began to call. Within the enclosure, an eleventh-century church dedicated to him survives alongside the remains of two high crosses, a holy well, and a fifteenth-century Augustinian priory. The site accumulated religious buildings across nearly a millennium, with the priory sitting outside the inner D-shaped enclosure but still within the great outer ring. A 1552 lease issued under the fiants of Edward VI, granting the site to John Hogan, clerk and late prior of Lorrowe in Lower Ormond, refers to land called 'Friars Rath', a name that may be a direct echo of this ancient enclosure. The Dominican friary is the only ecclesiastical structure that falls entirely outside the large enclosure, a small but telling spatial anomaly in a site where geography and religious hierarchy seem to have been carefully managed for generations. Several low wall-footings of further buildings are scattered across the interior, including the remains of at least two rectangular structures near the north-east corner of the surviving graveyard wall, their dimensions still measurable but their purposes unrecorded.