Two bear chamfered edges, and all carry the tool-marks of a skilled medieval mason. They are deeply embedded in the masonry, so that only portions of each stone are visible, but what shows is enough: these are loop jambs, the dressed stone surrounds that once framed the narrow defensive windows of a tower house.

A tower house is a compact, vertically arranged fortified residence, common across Ireland from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, and the craftsmanship visible on these fragments is consistent with that tradition. Researchers Ua Cróinín and Breen, writing in 1996, identified the stones as being cut and dressed in typical tower house fashion and pointed to a probable source: the ruins of a tower house standing roughly 275 metres to the north-west, of which virtually nothing now survives above ground. They further suggested that the same demolished structure likely provided the raw material for a property recorded on the 1920 Ordnance Survey six-inch map as Glencolumbkille House, situated about 115 metres to the west of the gate pier. That house, too, has since been levelled, leaving the fragments in the modern gate pier as one of the few remaining traces of what was once a more substantial architectural presence in this part of Clare.

The stones are visible from the roadside, built into the gate pier of the house, though their depth in the wall means close attention is needed to make out the chamfering and tool-marks that distinguish them from ordinary rubble fill. The tower house ruins to the north-west have left so little trace that the fragments in the pier are, in practical terms, all that physically remains of the building that almost certainly produced them.