What makes this Franciscan friary near the Black River in County Galway unusual is how much more survives: a bake house, a refectory, a buttery, a kitchen with a stone-built water and fish tank, a watermill, dormitories, a latrine, and a curious three-storey structure at the north-east corner of the chancel that locals have long called Burke's Castle. The complex reads less like a ruin and more like a ghost of a working community, its daily rhythms still legible in stone.

The friary's foundation date is disputed among historians, though the substantial remains standing today are mainly late fifteenth century in date. The church, running east to west and stretching roughly 36.5 metres in length, has a nave and chancel arrangement with a fine four-light pointed arch window in the east gable. At the junction of nave and chancel, a five-storey crenellated tower was inserted into the structure, and above the tower's low chancel arch there may once have been a rood loft, the kind of elevated screen platform common in medieval churches for separating the clergy's choir from the nave used by lay worshippers. Off the south aisle, a double transept contains two chapels, with further chapels added later to the transept's east wall and to the west end of the aisle. A pointed arch doorway beneath the tower leads north into the cloister, a covered walkway enclosing a courtyard around which the sacristy and conventual buildings are arranged across two storeys. Beyond this lies a second courtyard, and it is here that the domestic and agricultural infrastructure of the community becomes most apparent. Burke's Castle, abutting the north-east corner of the chancel, may have served as a sacristy at ground level with a guest-house above, though its local name hints at the kind of secular associations that often accumulated around monastic buildings over the centuries after suppression.

The friary sits in low-lying pastureland, and the associated gatehouse, road, and field system that once organised the approach to the complex are also recorded. Walking through, the layering of the site rewards patience: the additions and alterations accumulated over generations of Franciscan occupation are visible in the fabric of the walls themselves, each chapel or doorway representing a decision made by a community that continued to adapt its home well into the late medieval period.