The name is a loose anglicisation of Móin na mBráthar, the Bog of the Friars, and what it marks is not a friary in the conventional sense, with church, cloister, and chapter house, but rather the place where a small group of Franciscan men retreated when their world collapsed around them. They came here not to build but simply to survive.

The friars had belonged to Kilconnell Friary, a Franciscan house a short distance away in east Galway. In the years leading up to the Battle of Aughrim in 1691, one of the decisive engagements of the Williamite War in Ireland, they were driven out by an officer of King William's forces and took refuge in the bog, living in what one source described as miserable shielings, meaning crude temporary shelters of the kind used by transhumant herders. By 1698, the community had distributed or sold off their remaining possessions, including vestments, books, beds, bed linen, and kitchen utensils, to local families, suggesting they had accepted that a return to Kilconnell was no longer possible. When the traveller Samuel Molyneux visited Kilconnell in 1709, he was shown the bog settlement and recorded that the friars there were elderly and blind, kept alive by the charity of Catholic neighbours, employing someone to beg on their behalf. John O'Donovan, writing in 1838 from local tradition, added a striking detail: a bell from Kilconnell had been found in the bog by a man named Page, a bell reputedly weighing twelve stones and said to have been the loudest in Connacht, with the name of the friary and its founding date inscribed on its side. By O'Donovan's reckoning, the settlement had been abandoned around 1784, a date that aligns closely with the death of the last recorded guardian, Fr Anthony Blake O.F.M., who died in 1785.

What remains on the ground today is faint but legible to a patient eye. A roughly rectangular area, approximately 100 metres north to south and 63 metres east to west, is enclosed by two ruined walls set between five and fifteen metres apart. A stream runs along the eastern and southern edges within this space, and an avenue-like feature traces the western and northern sides. The interior is divided by a further east to west wall, and slight undulations in the ground suggest the former presence of buildings. Just to the north-west, the remnants of a rectangular structure, nine metres long and five metres wide, survive to as many as four courses of stonework, possibly part of a cluster of small houses that appeared on the earliest Ordnance Survey maps of the area. By the time the third edition of those maps was published in 1933, the site was already marked simply as "Site of", a designation that captures something of the quiet erasure that had been under way for well over a century.