Somewhere along the southern approach to Athy's Town Hall, you are walking over what was once a walled religious complex complete with a church, belfry, chapterhouse, dormitory, kitchen, cemetery, and orchard. Nothing marks the spot. No stone, no plaque, no outline in the grass. The Dominican priory that occupied this ground for nearly three centuries has left no visible surface trace whatsoever.

The priory was founded in the mid-thirteenth century, with sources placing the date at either 1253 or 1257. The founder is similarly uncertain; candidates include the Boisles, the Wogans (also recorded as the Ouganos), and a certain de St. Michael. Whoever was responsible, the house was built on the east bank of the River Barrow, inside the town's defensive perimeter, and it functioned there as a Dominican community through the medieval period. The Dominicans, a mendicant order founded in the early thirteenth century and dedicated to preaching and scholarship, typically established their houses close to urban populations, which explains the riverside town-centre location. The priory was suppressed in 1539, and the following year a jury reported that the buildings had been burnt the previous June by Donald McCare Kavanagh. An inquisition of 1542 still found enough remaining to describe the full range of monastic structures in some detail, suggesting the damage had been partial rather than total. The community was later re-established as part of a broader Dominican revival; Fr. Ross Mageoghegan, who became Provincial of the Irish Dominicans in 1622, was among those responsible for restoring Athy as one of the order's active houses. The priory was garrisoned during the Confederate Wars of the 1640s and finally destroyed in 1650. Despite that definitive end to the buildings, Dominicans continued to maintain a presence in Athy in some form until the middle of the nineteenth century.