What makes the Franciscan site at Abbeyland in County Westmeath quietly stranger still is the way the centuries have been folded into one another inside the building. The medieval south transept, part of the original thirteenth-century structure, now serves as the nave of the present Franciscan church, while the archway beneath the tower has been repurposed as a chapel shrine to St. Anthony. The old and the new are not so much side by side as interleaved.

The friary was founded in the thirteenth century by William Delamar, and in 1460 it was reformed into an observant order, a stricter form of Franciscan life that emphasised a return to the rule of poverty and communal discipline. When the Delamere family line died out, patronage of the friary passed to the Nugents. By 1540, the friars had already abandoned the site, though a contemporary description of what they left behind is remarkably precise: a hall with buttery and kitchen, a church with cloister and chapter-house beneath a dormitory, a malt-house, brew-house and bakery, a cemetery, a small wood, a garden, orchard, and close, the whole site amounting to six or more acres and enclosed by ditches of running water, with a further forty-three acres of land and a small island beyond. Whatever drove the friars out, the place was not in disrepair. In the decades that followed, the friary was burnt twice and raided by English forces at least six times between 1590 and 1617, a period of sustained disruption that reduced many Irish religious houses to rubble or long abandonment.

The fact that the building is still in active Franciscan use means that visitors encounter a living place rather than a scheduled monument. The medieval fabric is not preserved at a distance but absorbed into daily religious life, which gives the site a layered quality that roofless ruins rarely achieve.