The chamfered stone, punch-dressed in a technique typical of medieval craft, was once part of a window in the parish church of Finnoe. It has been set into the jamb of the pedestrian stile, repurposed and embedded, carrying the geometry of a much older building into the fabric of a much newer one. A second medieval punch-dressed jambstone is visible in the same southern entrance. These are not dramatic ruins or grand survivals; they are fragments, held quietly in place.

The parish of Finnoe, whose name may derive from the Irish Fionnú, possibly meaning woods, has a recorded ecclesiastical history stretching back to at least 1302, when it appeared in the taxation records of the Diocese of Killaloe. By the time of the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, the site was noted as the churchyard and church of Finnogh, and the survey recorded two acres of glebe land, that is, land assigned to support a parish clergyman, lying to the east of the churchyard, described at that point as waste. The Church of Ireland church now standing in the western part of the graveyard was built in 1794 by a mason named Peter Stokesberry. It likely sits on the footprint of the medieval church, and stones from that earlier structure may have been absorbed into the walls of both the 1794 building and the rectangular graveyard enclosure, which measures approximately 44 metres north to south and 70 metres east to west. The headstones within the enclosure date mainly to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

A second pedestrian entrance in the centre of the east wall, fitted with stone piers, is thought to have served the residents of Finnoe House, which stands about 115 metres to the north. That small practical detail, a private gate aligned to a nearby house, gives a sense of how closely the graveyard was woven into the social geography of this townland, whose Irish name, An Currach Mór, translates as the big marsh.