Situated on the Adare Manor Golf Course, the friary was founded in 1464 and while now in ruins, is in fact one of the most structurally complete Franciscan foundations in Ireland. Adare was the first house founded specifically as a reformed or Observant Franciscan house in Ireland, with most other foundations adopting new Franciscan reform in the 1460s. It enjoyed the patronage of the powerful Fitzgeralds during the fifteenth century.

Details of the extensive gifts and benefactions received by the friars from local patrons survive in a description of Donatus Mooney, a seventeenth-century Irish Franciscan historian who had access to a now lost register of the friary. In the nineteenth century, the friary was incorporated into the redesign of the estate of the Earl of Dunraven and remains within the grounds of Adare Manor today.

Visit www.monastic.ie for more information

View the video here. which was produced for Adare Tidy Towns by Corbett Photography and Landyphoto.com