What makes its situation quietly odd is the layering of history it occupies: the wall into which it is set is not merely a graveyard boundary but a surviving stretch of the town's medieval defensive wall, placing a funerary monument within what was once a fortification.

The effigy is believed to have originated in the Hackett chapel, part of the Franciscan friary that once stood roughly a hundred metres to the north-east. Franciscan friaries typically housed a number of private family chapels, endowed by local gentry who claimed burial rights within them, and the Hackett family appear to have been among those patrons. At some point the effigy was moved from that context and reset into its current niche at the southern end of the south-western boundary wall of the Cathedral of St John the Baptist and St Patrick's Rock graveyard. An effigy tomb, in the medieval tradition, was a sculpted representation of the deceased laid atop or set within a tomb chest, intended both as a memorial and as a prompt for prayers for the soul of the departed. Removed from its chapel and repositioned into a wall, this one has lost much of that original liturgical function, though it retains the physical presence that made such objects so central to late medieval commemorative culture.