When builders broke ground there in 1804, they found burials, the silent remainder of a religious complex that had long since disappeared from the surface of the city. A fragment of carved stonework, a double ogee-headed window surround, survived a little longer, built into a wall at Wise's Hill, the kind of quiet recycling that tells you something substantial once stood nearby.

The friary is attributed to Diarmait MacCarthaig, with the Annals of Four Masters recording the foundation of a monastery of St. Francis at Cork in 1229, though the precise date remains uncertain. By around 1300, a confirmation grant issued by Philip Prendergast gave a clear picture of the friary's extent: it occupied land running between the burgesses of Shandon, likely along what is now Shandon Street, and a holy well to one boundary, and between a rock cliff to the north and the River Lee to the south. That is a substantial urban footprint. Two maps made centuries later, the Hardiman map of around 1601 and Philips' map of 1685, place the church on the north bank of the Lee near a bend in the river, roughly where St. Vincent's Bridge, a footbridge, now crosses. A new church was built in 1700, but on a different site, leaving the original location to be absorbed into the changing fabric of the city.

What makes the friary's story particularly interesting is how thoroughly it dissolved into Cork's streetscape. The boundary description from 1300 can be read against the modern map with reasonable confidence; the holy well it references has its own separate record. The ogee-headed window fragment at Wise's Hill, ogee referring to the S-curved moulding characteristic of later medieval Gothic stonework, is the kind of detail that repays a slow walk through the neighbourhood, even if the wall it was built into may itself have changed since it was noted.