The building is substantial, roughly 15.8 metres along its longer axis and 12 metres across, with walls still standing to about a metre in height and ranging from 1.7 to 2.8 metres thick. A wide entrance, some 3.4 metres across, survives in the southern wall near the south-east corner. What looks at first like a quiet mound of field-stone turns out, on closer inspection, to sit directly over the filled-in moat of an earlier Anglo-Norman castle, meaning the building is layered onto already ancient ground.

The school was founded around 1643 by Eugene O'Cahan, attached to the Franciscan community at Quin, and seems to have functioned as a studium, a formal place of learning associated with a religious house. A Clare-born Franciscan named Antonius Broudinus recorded in 1644 that it had over 800 students, a figure that scholars treat with scepticism but which at least suggests the institution was regarded as significant. It lasted barely eight years. Cromwellian forces destroyed it in 1651, and a lead bullet found in the construction cut during partial excavation in 2017 offers a quietly grim material echo of that period. The 1840 Ordnance Survey six-inch map still shows a building on this footprint, indicating the walls retained enough presence to be recorded nearly two centuries after the school's destruction. In scale, the structure has been compared to the O'Davoren school at Cahermacnaghten, also in Clare, known in Irish as Cabhal Tighe Breac, one of the better-documented bardic and learned institutions of early modern Ireland.