Augustinian Canons were communities of priests who lived under the Rule of St Augustine, distinct from monks in that they were ordained clergy often serving surrounding parishes as well as their own house. What makes this site quietly remarkable is precisely how little it announces itself. By the mid-nineteenth century, surveyors recording the area noted that the monastery had effectively vanished, leaving only a single fragment of wall standing roughly 3.6 metres high, 2.1 metres broad, and just under a metre thick. That wall is gone now too.

The house was traditionally associated with St Mary de Portu Pero and was possibly founded by Turlough O'Connor, the Connacht king, sometime between 1140 and 1180, placing its origins in a period of significant ecclesiastical reform and patronage across Ireland. It formed part of the broader monastic complex at Clonfert, a site long associated with St Brendan the Navigator, whose cathedral still stands nearby. What survives today is a pair of rectangular earthwork enclosures, which is to say the slight but legible shape of the place preserved in the ground itself. The northern enclosure, roughly 42 metres east to west and 36 metres north to south, retains a low bank along its southern and western edges and a scarp to the east, with grassed-over building foundations visible in its south-east corner alongside a mound of heavily overgrown rubble. A road now cuts through its northern limit. The larger southern enclosure, measuring about 55 metres by 32 metres, has a notably irregular eastern edge. Local knowledge holds that grave slabs were once found in the south-east part of that enclosure, though no trace of them is visible at the surface; they may simply be buried beneath the vegetation.