At the western edge of a broad marshy basin in County Waterford, the ruined church of St Barry sits within a high-walled graveyard, its southern wall reduced to a four-metre fragment. What survives above ground barely hints at the complexity of what once stood here, or at the two of medieval Europe's most powerful military orders that once controlled it.

The church was granted to the Knights Templar before 1180, making it one of the earlier Templar holdings in Ireland. The Knights Templar were a crusading religious order founded in the twelfth century, eventually suppressed by papal decree in the early fourteenth century; when that suppression came, their Irish properties passed to the Knights Hospitaller, another military-religious order, and Kilbarry followed that pattern in 1311. The site was farmed out, meaning leased to a lay tenant, sometime before 1527, though it continued to function as a parish church. A diocesan report of 1615 still described it as being in repair. When the antiquarian John O'Donovan visited around 1840, he recorded a church measuring roughly 40 feet by 17 feet, with a double belfry over the west gable, and two additional buildings attached or nearby, one of them nearly 58 feet long. Those ancillary buildings have since been removed, though excavations carried out in 2007 uncovered traces of the larger structure, along with a contemporary timber building just to its south. A table tomb south of the church is thought to date from the late sixteenth century, though the cover slab noted by the Reverend R. H. Ryland in his 1824 county history has since gone missing. Architectural fragments, including the remains of a pointed doorway, still lie within the graveyard enclosure.

Excavations in 2004 and 2007 also revealed something quietly unexpected: a multi-phase cobbled roadway extending south-west from the graveyard, roughly ten metres wide and ninety metres long, its final surface sealed beneath silt. The road appears on Ordnance Survey maps from 1840 and 1951, and its line continues today as Lacken Road, a modern street effectively tracing the course of a medieval approach to a church that once answered to the Templars.