That institution has vanished so completely that no physical trace of it remains today, yet the church's own story carries enough strangeness to hold the attention on its own.

The earliest documentary record dates to 1510, when a Commissioner of the Bishop of Lismore and Waterford ruled, on the 20th of December that year, that the ecclesiastical revenues of St. Stephen's belonged to its rector rather than to the Prior of Athassel, the powerful Augustinian house a few miles to the north. The church's subsequent history was not a gentle one. A Court Survey conducted at Clonmel on the 9th of August 1655 found the building 'wholly destroyed onely some part of the wall standing', a description that still holds, more or less, three and a half centuries later. What survives is a much reduced structure measuring roughly 18 metres by 9.5 metres, with side walls standing no higher than 0.9 metres and gable ends only marginally taller. The Ordnance Survey Letters of 1840 recorded five windows across the church, two in the east gable, two in the south wall, and one in the west, and observed something peculiar: joist holes at first-floor level in the east gable, and a chimney on the west gable, suggesting that at some point after the church's ruin someone was living inside it, occupying an improvised upper floor within the shell of the nave. By the time of a later survey in 1942, a small aumbry, a shallow wall niche used to store liturgical vessels, was still visible in the south-east corner, along with a lancet window in the east gable and a small opening in the south wall.

The ruins sit at the northern end of a graveyard, east of St. Stephen's Place and south of the Western Road. The north wall was entirely hidden by trees and undergrowth at the time of the most recent inspection, and the overgrowth has continued to assert itself across the remaining stonework, making the site feel less like a ruin and more like a gradual return of the ground to itself.