The Church of Ireland building that occupies its eastern quadrant dates to the eighteenth century, but the ground beneath it carries a much longer and more turbulent story than its relatively modest appearance suggests.

According to the Kilkenny ecclesiastical historian William Carrigan, writing in 1905, this was once the site of the ancient Catholic parish church of the Holy Cross of Castlecomer. That medieval church almost certainly came down in the 1630s, when the English planter Christopher Wandesford constructed a new church between 1635 and 1637 as part of a planned town he was building at Castlecomer. A planned town, in this context, means a settlement laid out deliberately from scratch rather than one that grew organically, and Wandesford's project was among the more ambitious plantation-era undertakings in Leinster. The new church he built did not last long. In 1641, during the Confederate Catholic uprising, it was attacked and destroyed. The circumstances were particularly grim: a number of Protestant planters had taken refuge inside the building when the town came under assault, and it was burned with them sheltering there. The present Church of Ireland structure may stand on or very close to the footprint of both its predecessors. The earliest legible headstone in the graveyard dates to 1704, placing the visible burial record just a generation after that violence.

The graveyard is set within the Castlecomer Demesne, and the approach on foot involves a notably steep ascent from the estate entrance. Visitors with an interest in early headstone carving may find the post-1704 examples worth examining, given that this stretch of Kilkenny produced some distinctive work in that period.