The long rectangular shell of a church that stands there belonged to a preceptory, meaning a subordinate house, of the Order of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem, the same organisation known today as the Knights Hospitaller or the Knights of Malta. That the village itself carries the memory of the institution in its very name, while a nineteenth-century Catholic church dedicated to the same patron saint, St John the Baptist, stands just a few metres to the west, gives the place an odd layered quality, as if each century quietly acknowledged what the last had built.

The order had its origins in a hospice founded in Jerusalem around 1070 to care for Christian pilgrims travelling to the Holy Land. In Ireland, its central priory was established at Kilmainham in Dublin in 1174, with a network of preceptories spreading across the country. The one at Hospital was, according to Gwynn and Hadcock, second in importance only to Kilmainham itself. It was founded in 1215 by Geoffrey de Marisco, Justiciar of Ireland, and dedicated to St John the Baptist. The following year, King John issued letters of unlimited protection for the Prior of St John of Jerusalem, addressed through Geoffrey de Marisco at Knockainey nearby. There is a suggestion, recorded by Ferrar in 1784, that the site may have had an even earlier life as an Augustinian monastery founded during the reign of Henry II, though the thirteenth-century preceptory is what the surviving fabric reflects. By 1303, an ecclesiastical survey recorded the church of Any in the Deanery of Grene as having an annual value of 8 marks, noting simply that the Hospitallers are rectors. The dissolution under Henry VIII brought the preceptory to an end in 1541, when the last preceptor, Eneas O'Heffernan, received a pension of £28 17s 8d, and the property was leased to a group of Limerick and Kilmallock merchants. Successive leases followed under Elizabeth I, and by 1587 the lands had been absorbed into the Munster Plantation and granted to Sir Edward Fyton.

The ruins sit within the working graveyard at the northern end of the village, 110 metres south of the River Mahore. A visit rewards a slow circuit of the site rather than a quick glance from the gate. St John's holy well lies roughly 70 metres to the north-north-east, and the site of a medieval castle is approximately 120 metres to the north-east, making this corner of a small Limerick village unexpectedly dense with overlapping periods. The watermill associated with the preceptory, recorded as far back as the 1541 dissolution survey, stood 730 metres to the north-west near Hospital Bridge, and its site is also listed as a recorded monument. The graveyard remains in use, so the ruins are accessible but the surroundings call for a degree of consideration.