What remains of the Franciscan friary here amounts to a section of the nave's north wall, rising to around six metres, and parts of the south transept, all built from uncoursed slaty limestone in the manner typical of modest mendicant houses. The south wall of that transept still carries a round-headed three-light window, its sandstone jambs just about legible beneath centuries of weathering. In the nave, a large arch was inserted at some later point, and the only genuinely original feature still identifiable is a fragment of a window splay at the eastern end, a small clue to what the interior once looked like.

The friary was founded during the reign of Henry III, who ruled from 1216 to 1272, placing its origins somewhere in the mid-thirteenth century, a period when Franciscan houses were spreading rapidly through Irish towns under Anglo-Norman patronage. The Franciscans, a mendicant order committed in theory to poverty and preaching, typically built simply and in urban settings where they could serve local populations. This particular house does not appear in the documentary record until 1325, which suggests either that earlier records have been lost or that the community took some decades to attract written notice. By that point the friary would have been a functioning part of the town's religious life for at least a generation.