That kind of survival is unusual enough, but Askeaton Friary offers something further: a sundial incised into the north wall of the ambulatory, consecration crosses still visible in the plaster of the south range, and a carved panel of St. Francis in deep false relief set into the cloister arcade itself, measuring roughly sixty centimetres high. These are not restorations or later commemorations. They are the working fabric of a medieval religious house, left more or less where the friars left them.

The first documentary record of the friary dates to 1400, when it was referred to as Inysgebryny, the Anglicised form of Inis Geightine. Its founder was probably Gerald, the 4th Earl of Desmond, one of the great Hiberno-Norman magnates of the late medieval period. The house survived the Dissolution of the Monasteries, which swept away so many Irish religious communities in the sixteenth century, and a provincial Franciscan chapter was still being held here as late as 1564. That reprieve did not last. During the Desmond Wars, a series of rebellions against Elizabethan rule in Munster, the friary was seized by Nicholas Malby and the community expelled, at some point between 1579 and 1581. The building they left behind is a complex accumulated over two centuries: a fourteenth and fifteenth century limestone church with a five-light east window and switch-line tracery throughout, a cloister with east and west ranges, a two-storeyed refectory sunk about a metre and a half below the cloister floor, and a later barrel-vaulted western structure whose ground floor includes what was described as a prison and a garderobe, a small sanitary closet built into the wall. Carved stone doorways with Renaissance-style decoration suggest the friars were still maintaining and updating the building in the sixteenth century, not long before they were forced out. A large tower recorded in the early seventeenth century illustration known as the Pacata Hibernia drawing has since vanished entirely.

Askeaton is a small town on the N69 between Limerick city and Foynes, and the friary sits on the riverbank close to the town centre, near the better-known Desmond Castle. The site is a National Monument, and the cloister in particular repays slow attention: look for the carved figure of St. Francis on the north side of the arcade, and for the sundial on the ambulatory wall. The chapter house contains over fifty collected fragments of architectural stonework, including window mouldings and a roof boss, removed from elsewhere on the site. The west range retains traces of mural decoration on the first floor, faint but present, a reminder that these walls were once finished and painted rather than the bare limestone they appear today.