The problem is that no friary appears ever to have existed there, and the label itself may be the product of a name drifting loose from its origins over several centuries.

The story begins with a two-storey over basement house called St Austin's House, built in 1763 on ground that local tradition held to be the site of a church founded by an early Irish saint named Augustin. That name, somewhere along the way, became entangled with the rather more famous Augustine of Hippo, the fifth-century theologian whose followers became the Order of St Augustine, a mendicant order active in medieval Ireland. The confusion was already established by the time Samuel Lewis noted the tradition in his 1837 topographical dictionary, and a 1925 paper by Ua Dubhghaill traced the same conflation. There is, in short, no evidence that the Augustinian friars ever held land or built here; what seems likely is that an obscure local saint's name was gradually reinterpreted through a more recognisable ecclesiastical lens. A single stone mortar, turned up during ploughing and now kept at a nearby house, is the only physical object connecting the site to any earlier occupation. Archaeological testing to the north-east of the house produced nothing that might support the tradition.