Its opening has been blocked up, and yet the piece itself endures: over two metres wide and nearly two metres tall, fashioned from dark Kilkenny marble with white marble rosettes set into its surround. At the centre sits an oval panel bearing the coat of arms of the Watson family, carved in white marble, depicting a chevron engrailed between three birds arranged two above one. Beneath it runs the family motto in Latin: MEA GLORIA FIDES, meaning "my glory is faithfulness".

Kilkenny marble, quarried from the limestone deposits around Kilkenny city, has been used in Irish interiors since at least the seventeenth century, and its dark, almost black surface lent a particular gravity to grand chimney-pieces of the kind fashionable in early Georgian households. This example has been dated to the early eighteenth century, and architectural historians Craig and Garner, writing in 1975, considered it a magnificent specimen of the form. What makes its presence at Ballingarrane puzzling is the question of whether it actually belongs there. Craig and Garner suggested it was not made for any earlier house on the same site, but may instead have originated at Clonbrogan, a property built by the Watson family in the early seventeenth century. If so, the chimney-piece would have been moved at some point, carrying the family's heraldry and motto with it into a different domestic setting, where it now sits sealed and silent, detached from the hearth it was made to frame.