Scattered among the graves at Churchtown, on the southern bank of the River Suir, are fragments that point to a long and layered past: two graveslabs, a broken piece of an octagonal font, and a pair of armorial stones, the latter probably carved sometime in the eighteenth century. The armorial stones, bearing coats of arms typical of landed or ecclesiastical patronage, sit alongside the older material in a way that quietly compresses several centuries into a single enclosure.

The graveyard surrounds the parish church of Dysert, a rectangular walled plot running roughly fifty metres east to west and forty-five metres north to south, with a smaller annexe attached at the north-west corner. The name Dysert derives from the Latin desertum, meaning a desert or place of retreat, and in an Irish context it typically signals an early Christian hermitage or monastic cell, suggesting the site has been in religious use for a considerable time. The stream running approximately sixty metres to the north, and the River Suir itself forming a natural boundary to the south, would have made this a well-defined and practical location for such a settlement. The site was noted by the Reverend R. H. Ryland in his 1824 history of County Waterford, and returned to in the 1870s and again in the 1890s by writers surveying the ruined churches of the county, each visit finding the same quiet accumulation of stonework.

The octagonal font fragment is perhaps the most evocative object on the site. Fonts of this shape were common in medieval church architecture, and a fragment surviving in an open graveyard, displaced from whatever interior it once served, carries a particular kind of pathos. It is not displayed or labelled; it simply remains, among the slabs and the armorial stones, close to the river.