The head is round, lichen-covered, and unsettling in the specific way that old stone faces tend to be: bulbous eyes, a broken nose, thick lips parted in an open mouth, and faint grooves scored across the forehead. The outbuildings themselves date from the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, and the local landowner always understood the head to be part of the original construction. In all likelihood, it is not.

The difficulty with displaced stone heads is that they resist easy dating. Carvings of this kind appear across a span running from the Iron Age through to the post-medieval period, and without archaeological context, visual inspection can only take you so far. In this case, though, the grooved forehead and thick-lipped open mouth are features associated with medieval workmanship, and the facial expression compares closely with a carved head found at Merrion Castle in Co. Dublin. Two plausible origins have been suggested for the Milltown head. Faughalstown Church lies roughly 2.4 kilometres to the west, and Mortimer's Castle around 3 kilometres in the same direction; either site could have yielded loose stonework during the centuries of gradual ruin and robbing that followed their abandonment. How the head made its way into a gable wall is not recorded. Someone, at some point, clearly thought it worth keeping.