The surviving wall is built of greenschist, a coarse green-grey metamorphic rock that takes its colour from the mineral chlorite and is common in the older bedrock of the Dingle Peninsula. The Dingle Beds have weathered the local greenschist in various shades over hundreds of millions of years, and medieval masons used what came to hand. At 3.7 metres, the gable is taller than a person but lower than most surviving Irish ruins, suggesting either a small original building or, more likely, a church whose walls were never very high. The graveyard around the wall covers 0.776 hectares - about three quarters of an acre - and is laid out in the typical Irish pattern of a circular wall enclosing several centuries of burials, with the church serving as the focal point even after it ceased to function.

One stone in the graveyard tells an entire story. Its inscription, raised in 1816 by two descendants of the family, reads in part: 'Here lie Maurice Kennedy and his wife Judith Carrane, James Kennedy and his wife Alice Moriarty Achillon - said Maurice and James were the sons of John, son of Maurice, son of John Kennedy, who in the days of Cromwell left Nenagh in Ormond and settled in the Parish of Garfinach. This stone is consecrated to their memory by Jos. Kennedy, M.D., and the Revd. James Kennedy, P.P. of Dingle, sons of the said James, A.D. 1816.' Five generations are listed. The clinching phrase is 'in the days of Cromwell.' Sometime in the 1650s, a John Kennedy walked his family from Nenagh in County Tipperary to a parish on the Dingle Peninsula, and his descendants felt the move worth recording 160 years later.

What forced John Kennedy out of Tipperary was the Act for the Settlement of Ireland 1652, the legal instrument that translated Cromwellian military victory into permanent demographic change. Catholic landowners across the wealthier parts of Ireland were ordered to forfeit their estates and transplant west of the River Shannon, into the poorer provinces of Connacht and Clare. The phrase 'to Hell or to Connacht,' attributed to Cromwell himself, captures the choice as it felt at the time. Tens of thousands of families were uprooted in the years following 1652. The O'Kennedys were one of the great old Irish clans of Ormond, the lordship around Nenagh. Their land was given to Cromwellian soldiers and English investors in payment for the war. They were pushed west. Kerry, although technically outside the official transplantation zone, absorbed many such refugees because it was poor enough to be politically uninteresting and remote enough that the new English landlords could not be bothered to police it.

Irish graveyards are often the densest historical records in their parishes. Where formal records were burned or never kept, where churches lost their registers and landlords moved on, the headstones remained - cut once, set deep, and refusing to give up their facts. The Kennedy stone at Garfinny is one of countless examples across Ireland of family history recorded on slate or local stone because no other medium was available. Genealogists working on the Famine-era emigration to America and Australia routinely begin by walking graveyards like Garfinny's, copying inscriptions before lichen and weather render them illegible. Some stones are now unreadable. Many will be unreadable within another generation. The Kennedy stone, recut at some point and well sheltered behind the surviving gable, is still entirely legible. The family did the work to make sure of that.

Stand in front of the surviving east gable and you face the way the priest faced. The original altar would have been in front of you - long gone, perhaps reused as a fence post in some nearby field. Behind the wall, the small graveyard opens to the surrounding pasture, and beyond it the green slopes of the Dingle hinterland roll west toward the Atlantic. The Garfinny River runs through the same townland, crossing under the medieval drystone bridge to the north. Two National Monuments in one small parish. A medieval church reduced to a single wall, a medieval bridge reduced to a relic - and both of them still here, holding the stories of the people who once walked between them.