What survives in County Kerry is a roofless Augustinian church whose walls still carry a remarkable amount of carved detail, most notably a five-light east window with curvilinear reticulated tracery, a type of decorative stonework in which the stone bars of a window form repeating net-like patterns. Architectural historian Harold Leask noted something technically unusual about this window: the mullions and bars are square in section but only slightly chamfered, and the handling of the marginal apertures at the springing was not entirely resolved. It is, in other words, an ambitious piece of late medieval craftsmanship that did not quite come off, which makes it considerably more interesting than one that did.

The priory was founded in 1215 by Geoffrey de Marisco, an Anglo-Norman Justiciar, for the Canons Regular of St Augustine, a community of clergy who followed a monastic rule but also served the wider Church. It was built on the site of an earlier church dedicated to St Coleman, which suggests the ground was already considered significant before the Normans arrived. The building was restored and extended in 1445, when that east window was inserted. The community survived until 1576 when the priory was suppressed during the Elizabethan dissolution of religious houses. In 1588 the Crown granted the site, along with a sprawling portfolio of rectories and land parcels across Kerry, to a Thomas Springe, on condition that he maintain two English horsemen and rebuild the abbey in the manner of a castle. The domestic buildings that once enclosed the cloister garth, the open courtyard around which monastic life was organised, to the south of the church were destroyed in 1649.

The walls that remain are substantial. The north and south walls each run to 38 metres and still carry identifiable features: a possible stoup near the west gable, the low remnants of a rood screen wall that once divided the nave from the chancel, ogee-headed windows with fine limestone dressings, a double sedilia set into the south wall near the altar end (a sedilia being a set of recessed seats used by the officiating clergy during Mass), and what may be a tomb niche with a semicircular arch of punch-dressed red sandstone. An intramural staircase survives in the south wall with three steps visible at ground level and more visible higher up, curving to the right. The contrast between the red sandstone used in structural repairs and the fine limestone of the carved details runs throughout the building, giving the ruin a patchwork quality that reflects its long and interrupted history.