That detail, atmospheric as it sounds, is almost beside the point once you begin looking closely at the stonework: a double piscina with quatrefoil basins tucked beneath a chancel window, small round-arched niches still carrying traces of painted black patterning on their original plaster, corbels set into a tower archway that once supported a rood screen. This is a building that rewards attention to particulars.

The friary sits in rolling parkland within Killarney National Park, about 300 metres from the eastern shore of Lough Leane, on the eastern side of a graveyard that has continued in use long after the friars left. Construction began around 1450, with the chancel the earliest surviving element; the rest of the complex, comprising nave, transept, tower, sacristy, and three ranges of domestic buildings around a square cloister, was built on what the architectural historian Harold Leask described as a preconceived plan, completed in successive stages by around 1475, with the transept possibly as late as 1500. The tower is an unusual insertion, straddling the full width of the church between chancel and nave, its central space roofed with rib vaulting and flanked by groin vaults, with two round openings that once carried bell-ropes. The cloister ambulatories, rather than being covered by the usual lean-to roofing, are vaulted and contained within the surrounding ranges, giving the internal spaces a solidity uncommon in Irish friaries of this scale. A stone plaque in one of the chancel's tomb recesses carries a date of 1631, a reminder that the building remained in use, and in memory, well after the Reformation. The Office of Public Works cleared the ruin of overgrowth in the 1930s and carried out extensive consolidation work at that time, including concreting over the dormitory floors and exposing the full original height of the cloister arcades.

The friary is freely accessible within Killarney National Park. The cloister is the obvious place to orientate yourself, but the chancel interior repays a slow circuit: the piscina, a stone basin used for rinsing liturgical vessels, and the adjacent sedilia, a recessed seat for officiating clergy, are set into the south wall in close sequence, and the small niches in the transept's east wall, with their surviving plaster and faint painted decoration, are easy to overlook in the general sweep of the space.