What was once a sixty-foot tower, said by local people to have closely resembled the well-known Franciscan house at Adare, with its stepped battlements, double lights, and string courses, has been picked apart so thoroughly that the ruins are now levelled to the ground. The stone was reused for building, which was common enough, but the completeness of the disappearance gives the site an unusual quality: a place that was substantial within living memory, and is now essentially invisible.

The site carries a complicated history, layered across several centuries and two religious orders. According to Gwynn and Hadcock, a Cistercian monastery was founded at Kilshane in 1198 by Donnchad Cairbreach O'Brien, King of Limerick, but it failed not long after its establishment. The site lay dormant until the fifteenth century, when it was refounded as a Franciscan house for the Third Order Regular of St. Francis, an order whose members followed a modified Franciscan rule while living in community, distinct from the more familiar mendicant friars. Westropp, writing in 1904 to 1905, records it as the Monastery of St. John, founded around 1410 by FitzGerald of Clenlis. It later became entangled in the political upheavals of Elizabethan Ireland: in 1584, a man named Gerot Baluff f. Philip held the patronage of the house, along with a water-mill and lands in Ballingarry and Kilnemona, at the time he joined a rebellion. The site has also been confused in the historical record with the Cistercian cell of Kilshanny in County Clare, a reminder of how easily similar place-names can muddle the documentary trail.

When an Ordnance Survey correspondent recorded the fabric of the building around 1840, there was still a great deal to describe: a nave and choir, a tower on two pointed arches, ogee-headed lights in the tower, a large pointed east window, and walls standing to seventeen feet on the north side. The tower fell in 1854, not during the famous great gale of 1839 as local tradition had it, and what remained was gradually taken for building stone. A visitor to the area today would find no standing masonry, and should go primarily with an interest in the historical layering of the site rather than any expectation of visible fabric. The location near Ballingarry is worth cross-referencing carefully on current maps, given the longstanding confusion with similarly named sites elsewhere in Ireland.