The wall itself does double duty, serving simultaneously as a stretch of the old town wall, and the effigy set into it belongs, by all accounts, somewhere else entirely. An effigial tomb of this kind typically presents the deceased lying in full sculptural detail, and this one carries a shield alongside the armoured figure, the whole composition suggesting a man of considerable standing whose memorial was later separated from its original context.

The tomb has been dated to around 1320 on the basis of the armour's close resemblance to an effigy at Kilfane, Co. Kilkenny, a comparison drawn by the scholar John Hunt in his 1974 study of Irish medieval figure sculpture. The figure is believed to have originated in the Hackett Chapel of Cashel's Franciscan Friary, and may represent Sir William Hackett, identified as the friary's founder. The seventeenth-century Franciscan historian Luke Wadding, writing in 1734, recorded that the Hackett Chapel once held many tombs of founders and associated families, suggesting the chapel was a significant site of memorial before its contents were dispersed. The effigy's story does not end at the graveyard wall, however. A sarcophagus discovered in the friary's crypt, now held at the Vicar's Choral on the Rock of Cashel, is considered to be the lower portion of the same monument, meaning what was once a single tomb is now split between two separate locations a short distance apart.