The "West" was appended deliberately, as Sir Henry Piers noted in 1682, precisely to avoid that confusion. But the name is only the beginning of the strangeness. Within a single sub-rectangular graveyard in Kilkenny West, the physical evidence of more than a thousand years of religious activity has become so layered and displaced that pieces of the medieval church have ended up serving as grave-markers, and the baptismal font now sits beside a holy well 240 metres away.

The earliest presence here belongs to St. Canice, the sixth-century monastic founder whose name also gives Kilkenny city its Irish form, Cill Chainnigh. A monastery attributed to him was established on this site in the mid-sixth century. By 1682, when Piers was writing, the landscape held the ruins of a Knights Templar abbey roughly 70 metres to the south-south-east, and a church that was, in his words, "in good repair", which most likely refers to the small rectangular chapel that still stands in the south-east corner of the graveyard. The roofless Church of Ireland building that now dominates the northern part of the enclosure came much later, rebuilt around 1839 to a design associated with Joseph Welland and paid for by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners of Ireland, as a cut stone plaque above its entrance records. It was constructed of coursed limestone with a bellcote over the west gable, and it may have incorporated or simply replaced an earlier structure dating to around 1550. No medieval fabric survives visibly within its walls, though two salvaged fragments tell their own story: a punch-dressed quoin and a window mullion from the original medieval parish church have been set into the ground to the south, repurposed as grave-markers. Where exactly the medieval church itself stood remains uncertain. It may lie beneath the 1839 building, elsewhere within the graveyard, or the small chapel to the south-east may represent what is left of it.

The graveyard sits within easy reach of several related sites. Kilkenny Castle, a separate monument, lies roughly 100 metres to the west, while St. Kenny's holy well is 240 metres to the north-east. It is beside that well that the medieval baptismal font from the parish church now rests, separated from the building it once served, and quietly outlasting it.