That is the quiet puzzle at the heart of this piece of medieval funerary sculpture in Cashel, County Tipperary, where a figure associated with the Hackett Chapel of the local Franciscan Friary has ended up set into a limestone niche in the south-eastern boundary wall of the Cathedral of St John the Baptist and St Patrick's Rock's graveyard. The wall itself does double duty, serving simultaneously as a length of the town's historic defensive wall, which gives the setting an additional layer of historical compression.

The effigy is described as coming from the Hackett Chapel, a dedicated family chapel within the Franciscan Friary, a common arrangement in medieval Irish mendicant churches where wealthy or prominent families would sponsor a side chapel in exchange for burial rights and ongoing prayers for their souls. Exactly when or why the effigy was moved from the friary to its current location is not recorded, but the displacement is not unusual in Irish ecclesiastical history; the suppression of the monasteries in the sixteenth century scattered furnishings, monuments, and stonework across parishes and graveyards, where they were often incorporated into whatever wall or structure was nearest and most convenient. The limestone niche in which it now sits, at the eastern end of the south-eastern boundary wall, gives it a degree of protection and a certain formal framing, even if the setting is some distance from wherever it was originally intended to stand.