The church itself is long gone, vanished so thoroughly that by the nineteenth century no trace of it remained above ground. What lingers in its place is something more quietly peculiar: a number of the headstones marking the graves appear to have been fashioned from architectural fragments, almost certainly salvaged from the church itself. The building, in other words, became its own memorial.

The church was dedicated to St Roc, or Rioc, and according to the ecclesiastical historian Edmund Hogan, writing in 1883, it predates the foundation of the walled town of Kilkenny altogether, making it one of the older religious sites in the area. It fell into disuse at some point, and by the time of a formal Inquisition in 1623, the church had already faded from the record; only the graveyard merited a mention. A decade later, in 1633, a man named Edmond Grace paid the town Corporation six shillings for a garden described as being at the corner of "St. Roch's churchyard", a transaction that tells us the site was still recognised by name even as it slipped into purely secular use. The church's stonework, rather than being carted away or left to moulder in a field, appears to have been pressed back into service among the graves it once overlooked.