The Franciscan house visible today was built by John O'Connor Kerry for monks following the Observantine Rule, a reforming branch of the Franciscan order that emphasised a return to strict poverty and austerity. But the site carries an older layer of devotion beneath it.

The friary is believed to stand on the footprint of an earlier church dedicated to St Lachtin of Muskerry in County Cork, a figure who died in 622 AD and whose feast day falls on the 19th of March. That a Kerry friary would be oriented around a Munster saint from a neighbouring county is quietly telling about how local religious networks operated in early medieval Ireland, where veneration followed routes of patronage and kinship rather than neat county lines. St Lachtin's connection to this particular patch of north Kerry ground persisted in a remarkably tangible form: local people were said to swear oaths by the hand of St Lachtin, a phrase that referred not to a figure of speech but to an actual relic. That relic, a preserved hand dating to the tenth century, is now held in the National Museum in Dublin, having outlasted the monastery, the Gaelic lordship that built it, and several centuries of neglect since.