The south-east angle of what was once the Priory of St. Mary at Gracedieu still stands, carrying a segmental arched doorway and a short vaulted passage, the masonry roughly coursed and thick with vegetation. It is one of those fragments that rewards attention precisely because so little remains; the recess cut into the south wall of the entrance, the intermittent run of south wall extending some eighteen to twenty metres, suggest the outline of something that was once far more substantial.

The priory owes its origins to John Comyn, Archbishop of Dublin, who endowed it for nuns around 1190. The community that eventually settled here belonged to the Arroasian order, a reform congregation of Augustinian canons and nuns that had a notable presence in twelfth-century Ireland. They had previously been based at Lusk, a few miles to the north-east, and moved to Gracedieu after 1195. Excavations carried out to the west of the surviving corner, recorded by Gowen in 1989, revealed considerably more of the settlement's later history. Beneath the soil were the walls of a large medieval building, demolished by the seventeenth century, its two earth-bonded walls enclosing an interior roughly seventeen by thirteen metres and laid directly onto a cobbled surface. Alongside it, excavators found the foundations of a possible post-medieval house or farm, a cobbled surface interpreted as a laneway some six metres wide, a lintel drain, and a ditch that once fed a millrace to the south. The site, in other words, continued to be occupied and modified long after the nuns had gone.

The site lies in agricultural land, and the surviving masonry sits amid significant vegetation growth, so it can take a moment to read clearly. Two holy wells are associated with the wider area: St. Bridget's Well lies to the west of the nunnery remains, and Lady Well sits in the field to the south, both recorded as separate monuments. Anyone visiting should expect a working rural setting rather than a managed heritage site, with all the informal access that implies. The wells, if sought out, add another layer to what was clearly a place of some local religious significance across many centuries.