It is located in Castletownroche, County Cork, Ireland near where the River Awbeg meets the Blackwater.

Once an affluent monastery, it was dissolved by Henry VIII in 1541, and the ruins are currently managed by Cork County Council.

[2] Bridgetown Priory was founded sometime after 1202 and before 1216 on land donated to the Augustinians by Alexander fitz Hugh.

[15] By this point the priory, consisting of "a church with belfry, dormitory, hall, buttery, kitchen, cloister, and cellar, wit divers [sic] other chambers", was in ruinous condition.

[16][17] These reports continue to claim that in 1595 Bridgetown was granted to Lodowick Bryskett, secretary to the Lord President of Munster to hold for fifty years - though by 1614, a survey carried by William Lyon, Bishop of Cork, Cloyne and Ross, found that the priory was jointly owned by Lord Roche and Sir Daniel O'Brien.

[17] During the 1830s a destitute woman lived in one of the priory's burial tombs with her two cats, and subsisted off of the charity of locals residents.

[21] O'Keefe, writing in 1999, stated that these works, particularly those carried out in the 1990s, had "reversed the trend of neglect" the ruins had experienced up to that point.

In initial excavations, it was discovered that the original floor surfaces, dating to the 13th and 15th centuries, had been destroyed.

[22] In further excavation works carried out that same year, buildings to the west of the church were uncovered, and are thought to belong to a late period in the monastery's history, and likely after its abandonment.