What makes them especially curious is that they were not placed there in any original design: they were discovered during restoration work in 1983, having been incorporated into the structure at some point in the building's long life, their earlier purposes largely forgotten.

The church itself, which sits south of Kilgobbin Lane near Stepaside Village in County Dublin, follows a plain rectangular plan with an entrance porch at the northwest angle. It is the fragments fixed to the south face of the north wall that reward closer attention. Among the eight pieces are two tall granite graveslabs and a graveslab fragment, the kind of upright markers that would once have stood over burials in the surrounding ground. Alongside these are four quernstone fragments, quernstones being the paired circular grinding stones used to mill grain by hand, a domestic and agricultural tool with a lineage stretching back thousands of years in Ireland. There is also a notched stone, whose original function is less immediately obvious. That such a varied collection of carved and worked stone ended up embedded in a single church wall suggests the building served, at some point, as a convenient source of re-usable material, or perhaps that someone deliberately gathered and preserved pieces they considered worth keeping.

The site lies along Kilgobbin Lane, south of Stepaside Village, and can be approached on foot. The church ruin sits on the lower slopes of Three Rock Mountain, so the ground around it can be soft and uneven, particularly after rain. The fragments themselves are set into the north wall interior, so it is worth stepping inside the roofless shell rather than viewing the structure only from outside. The stonework is granite, as is much of what you will find across this part of south County Dublin, and the graveslabs in particular retain a solidity that makes their long journey from grave marker to embedded wall fragment all the more thought-provoking.