What survives of St Mary's parish church in Dungarvan is, by any measure, a slender remainder: a single fragment of what may be the original west gable, roughly ten metres long and five metres high, punctuated by five small circular windows arranged in two neat rows. The fragment sits within a rectangular graveyard just outside the line of the old town walls, on a south-facing slope, quietly bypassed by most people moving through the town below.

The church has documentary references stretching back to the early thirteenth century, placing it among the older ecclesiastical foundations in County Waterford. It was burned down by the Confederate Catholics in 1642, during the turbulent period of the Irish Confederate Wars when alliances shifted and churches across the country were caught between competing factions. Local tradition holds that a steeple was subsequently demolished by Cromwellian forces, adding another layer of deliberate destruction to the building's already troubled history. Remarkably, despite the burning and the loss of the steeple, the structure continued in some form of use until the 1820s, when a replacement Church of Ireland building was erected nearby and the old fabric was finally abandoned to the graveyard that still surrounds it.

The surviving gable fragment, with its paired rows of circular openings, rewards a closer look. The graveyard itself remains in use and the site is accessible, sitting just beyond the medieval walled perimeter of the town.