The grass-covered wall footings, sunken building interiors, and confused pattern of ridges and hollows are all that remain above ground of what was once a substantial monastic complex. A single architectural fragment, part of the rib vaulting from the abbey's roof, now rests beside a nearby holy well dedicated to St. Canice, roughly 1,100 metres to the northeast. It is an oddly eloquent displacement: a piece of vaulted ceiling, the kind of stonework that implies height, ambition, and considerable resources, sitting quietly in a field beside a spring.

The site carries layers of occupation that scholars have sometimes struggled to keep separate. According to early monastic tradition, St. Canice founded a monastery here around the middle of the sixth century, and it is from him that the place takes its name, Cill-Chainnigh, which gave the parish and barony of Kilkenny West their designation. An abbot named Scannail is recorded as having died here in 773. The later medieval institution was something rather different: a house of the Fratres Cruciferi, or Crutched Friars, a branch of the Canons Regular of St. Augustine whose members wore a cross on their habit. This priory, dedicated to St. John the Baptist, was founded around 1200, apparently by Friar Thomas Dillon, grandson of Sir Thomas Dillon who had come to Ireland in 1185. The Dillon family remained closely associated with the house for the duration of its existence, with many members joining the community and several being elected prior. In 1335 the grand priory of Kilmainham held an exempt hospital here. After the Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII, the site passed into secular hands; in 1569, Robert Dillon, chief justice of the Common Bench, was granted the site along with twelve messuages, several carucates of land, and extensive tithes, at an annual rent of £22 0s. 10d. The attribution of the original foundation has long been contested: the Tyrrell family were at one point credited with it, but that claim was subsequently dismissed, and a 1682 account by Piers confidently, if incorrectly, assigned the ruins to the Knights Templars.

When the site was surveyed on the ground in 1981, the principal structure was a building approximately 16 metres long and 6 metres wide, oriented east to west, with foundation walls still standing to around a metre in height and an interior noticeably sunken below the surrounding land level. Traces of a small annex were visible at the western end, and to the north lay the outlines of further rectangular structures, some with collapsed masonry still scattered about. A barrel-vaulted chapel, barrel vaulting being a simple rounded ceiling formed by a continuous arch, survives in the adjoining graveyard and may originally have formed part of the same complex. Aerial photography from 2011 confirmed that the earthwork remains extend considerably beyond what is visible at ground level, enclosed within the ghost of a large precinct wall.