Today there is almost nothing left to see, and that absence is itself the point. The friary was not abandoned, dissolved, or left to crumble quietly over centuries. It was deliberately taken apart, its stone carted off and reused in the construction of Arkin Castle nearby. The building was, in effect, consumed by another building.

The friary was established in 1485, at a period when Franciscan houses were spreading actively across the west of Ireland, often under the patronage of local Gaelic lords. Whatever community settled here did not remain long in any architectural sense. The masonry was stripped for Arkin Castle, leaving the site historically documented but physically erased. Tradition, recorded in the Ordnance Survey Letters, placed the friary to the east of Friar's Well, a named holy well that still survives in the area. No surface traces have been found at that location. What has been identified lies slightly differently, to the south of the well, in the space between an early cross and one of Inis Mór's celebrated round towers. There, low grassed-over ridges mark out wall lines roughly forty centimetres high and about two metres wide, following an irregular plan across an area of approximately thirty-two metres by twenty-two metres. These humps in the turf are what a friary becomes when its stone is wanted elsewhere.

The traces sit in a landscape already dense with early Christian remains, which makes them easy to overlook. The round tower and the cross are prominent and well-visited; the low wall lines between them are less obviously legible. Knowing to look south of Friar's Well, and to read the slight undulations in the grass as outlines of rooms and enclosures rather than natural ground, is what separates the site from its surroundings.