When the west gable of this medieval church at Stonecarthy was rebuilt at some point after its original construction, the fine freestone blocks that had once formed the framework of the original entrance doorway were not discarded. They were broken up and used as ordinary building material, mortared in among rougher limestone and sandstone rubble. They are still there, visible on both faces of the gable, and the mouldings carved into them, including a three-quarter pointed bowtell with hollow, roll and hollow profiles, are characteristic of thirteenth-century architectural stonework, the kind of decorative detail that would originally have framed a formal entrance with considerable care. The church sits on a west-facing slope within a small graveyard, and the Irish name recorded in the Ordnance Survey Letters of 1839 gives a sense of how the place was understood locally: Roilig Stún Carrtha, meaning the burying ground of Stun Cartha.

The site has a documented history stretching back to the late twelfth century. As early as the episcopate of Felix O'Dulany, which ran from 1178 to 1202, a local landowner named William Tobin granted the church of Stamacharty, as it then appeared in the records, to the House of the Canons Regular of Kells in Ossory. The Canons Regular were communities of priests living under a rule, broadly Augustinian in character, and Kells in Ossory was one of the more significant such houses in medieval Kilkenny. When the historian William Carrigan visited the church around 1900, he recorded its dimensions as approximately 60 feet long by 25 feet wide, and noted that part of the south wall predated the Norman Invasion entirely. He described the masonry, with its large irregular blocks, as almost cyclopean, a term usually applied to prehistoric construction techniques using massive unworked stones, and the comparison gives some sense of the wall's peculiar, ancient-feeling weight.

The east gable still stands close to its full height and retains the jambs of a window embrasure, though the window itself is broken out. The north wall has been reduced almost entirely to its footings, with a heap of fallen stone gathered at its west end. On the interior face of the surviving portion of the west gable, a large granite wall monument with a moulded frame and pediment remains in place, though the memorial plaque it once held is gone. A graveslab dating to the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century survives within the graveyard. The pointed doorway in the south wall, with its voussoirs, that is, the wedge-shaped stones forming the arch, still stands to a height of just over a metre and a half, an opening narrow enough to feel deliberate.