The stones you see today form a modest rectangular structure, just 8.2 metres long and 4.8 metres wide, with a doorway in the west wall, narrow windows at either end of the east wall, and a recess to the south. Scholars have disagreed about its age: one reading places it in the late sixteenth century, while other analysis suggests the building and the graveyard itself are more likely eighteenth or nineteenth century in origin. That ambiguity is part of what makes the site interesting.

The deeper history begins in 1427, when a Dominican friary was established here by the order's community at Athenry, a town in east Galway that was one of the most significant centres of Dominican activity in medieval Ireland. That original foundation did not survive the sixteenth century intact. According to local tradition, its stones were taken and reused in the construction of Ballynahinch Castle, a fate that was far from unusual for dissolved or damaged religious houses, whose cut stone was a practical building resource in a landscape where good masonry was scarce. The friary was re-established at some point in the eighteenth century, and a rectangular east-west aligned building appeared on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, though that structure too has since disappeared. A slight raised area near the centre of the graveyard may be all that marks where it stood. Just outside the graveyard to the west-southwest, there is said to be the site of a holy well, one of the small freshwater springs that across Ireland became focal points for local devotion, often predating and then outlasting whatever formal ecclesiastical structures grew up beside them.