But that stretch of roughly coursed mixed stone, one metre thick and retaining an internal batter, is among the last visible traces of a medieval Dominican priory that once occupied an island to the west of Cork city, a community that endured for more than three centuries before the Tudor suppressions swept it away.

The priory was founded in 1229 by Philip de Barry, placing it among the earlier Dominican establishments in Ireland, arriving only a few decades after the order itself was founded. Its island setting, just beyond the city's southern edge, would have given it a degree of physical separation from the urban fabric while keeping it close enough to serve a lay population. By the time of its dissolution in 1541, the complex comprised a church, a belfry, two chapels, and various other buildings and houses, a fairly substantial footprint for a mendicant community. What the dissolution left behind, aside from the wall, scattered into curious corners. Five carved stones, including window and cloister fragments, passed eventually to a private residence on Boreenmanagh Road. More striking still is a fourteenth-century ivory figurine of the Virgin and Child, which survived the upheaval and is now kept at the Dominican house on Pope's Quay, a rare and delicate object that quietly connects the present community on that quay to its medieval predecessor on the island.

The wall itself survives near a gateway into the modern convent, where it sits somewhat incongruously amid later buildings. The internal batter, a deliberate inward slope on the wall face designed to add structural stability, is still visible at a height of two metres, giving a sense of the original construction technique even in its fragmentary state.