Most of its stonework has been stripped away over the centuries, leaving behind only a handful of moulded column stones and a decorated terminal stone. Yet what remains is enough to suggest something of its original ambition. It is the easternmost of three tomb niches cut into the same wall, and beside it, just to the east, a double piscina survives, a basin used in medieval liturgical practice for disposing of water that had been in contact with sacred vessels, its presence hinting at the carefully ordered ritual geography of the space.

When the antiquarian R. A. S. Macalister examined the niche in 1913, he could make out barely more than the western jamb and the beginning of the arch above it, the rest having been swallowed up by later masonry and an altar tomb erected against the wall at some point. That altar tomb has since been removed too, bringing the niche back into partial view, though hardly into completeness. The decorative vocabulary of all three niches, foliage carving, nail-head ornament, chevron patterning, and cable moulding, places them within the Romanesque and Transitional traditions, those styles that bridged the rounded arches of Romanesque with the pointed forms of early Gothic. Scholars have taken these stylistic details as evidence that the niches belong to the original construction of the church, which dates to around 1241, making them among the earliest fabric of a Dominican foundation established in Athenry during a period of significant Anglo-Norman settlement in Connacht.

The church itself is worth approaching slowly. The surviving nave wall preserves the three niches in sequence, and even in their reduced state they repay close attention, particularly the carved fragments that remain in place. The easternmost niche is the most stripped of the three, but the decorated terminal stone gives some sense of the quality the original programme of carving must have had.