Fearchar, 1st Earl of Ross, founded the abbey in the 1220s, bringing Premonstratensians - the white canons of Whithorn Priory - to plant a monastic community in his northern lands. The first site was abandoned within a generation. In 1238, under the abbey's second leader, Malcolm of Nigg, the entire foundation was moved ten miles southeast to its present location. The reasons recorded are practical: the original site sat among lands made dangerous by the turbulence of the northern clans, and the new ground offered richer soil for the agriculture that supported the community. The abbey remained under the protection of the Earls of Ross, who maintained and defended it through the medieval centuries.

The church itself is deliberately plain. Oblong in shape, 96 feet long and 26 feet wide internally, it uses tall lancet windows for light - four equal lancets in the east gable, paired openings between the buttresses around the walls. The eastern end was partitioned off as the burial vault for the Ross of Balnagown family. Side chapels were added over the centuries: the south wing, dedicated to St Michael, was probably built by Abbot Finlay McFead before his death in 1485, and his canopied tomb still bears the inscription *Hic jacet Finlaius McFaed abbas de Fern qui obit anno MCCCCLXXXV*. The cloister and domestic buildings of the abbey are long gone; only the church survives, with the bell-rope groove worn deep into the stonework outside the tower.

The early sixteenth century brought political upheaval. Patrick Hamilton, a boy when he became commendator of Fearn, adopted Reformation principles as he grew up. He was burned at the stake as a heretic in 1528, age twenty-four. By 1560, the abbacy was a secular office; Nicholas Ross, who held it after 1545, sat in Parliament and voted to abolish Catholicism in Scotland. The abbey passed through Crown grants and bishop's hands through the seventeenth century. It continued as a parish church through it all. Then came that day in 1742, when the heavy flagstone roof failed mid-service. Nearly fifty members of the congregation - neighbours, farmers, families - died beneath the stone they had been singing beneath.

The replacement church built next to the ruined abbey was itself ruinous by the 1770s. In 1772 the parishioners rebuilt the original abbey shell instead - the structure that stands today, incorporating medieval fabric within an eighteenth-century restoration. Ian G. Lindsay & Partners restored it again in 1971, and Historic Scotland led further conservation work in 2002-2003. The congregation maintained links with Church of Scotland mission projects in Ekwendeni, Malawi, and the Tabeetha School in Israel. Regular services ended in 2023; in 2024 the parish was united with Tarbat and Tain into the new Easter Ross Peninsula Church of Scotland. Among those buried within the abbey walls are Fearchar himself, the founder, dead 1251, and General Charles Ross of Balnagown, honored for service to William III, dead 1732 - ten years before the roof came down.