The stones are Romanesque jambs, the vertical side-pieces that would once have flanked a church doorway, decorated in the distinctive manner of twelfth-century Irish ecclesiastical architecture: one bears two bands of lateral centrifugal chevron, the zigzag ornament that is a hallmark of the Romanesque style as it developed in Ireland; the other is carved along its arris, the sharp edge where two faces meet, with a roll moulding flanked by pellets. Neither is large, the taller measuring just 35 centimetres high, but the precision of the work is still legible.

Inchcleraun is an island in Lough Ree, and the monastic site there, enclosed within a cashel (a stone-walled enclosure of early medieval type), contains several churches and associated monuments, including an unfinished cross-base and a multiple bullaun stone, a boulder with more than one cup-shaped hollow, probably used for grinding or ritual purposes. Traces of what may be a cobbled road run southwards toward the church known locally as the Women's Church. The two jamb-stones were first noticed in 1932 to 1933, during maintenance works carried out by the Office of Public Works. Early scholarship proposed that they had originally formed part of a twelfth-century gateway through the cashel wall itself, marking a formal entrance into the monastery. More recent analysis has moved away from that reading; the stones are not in their original positions and the current consensus is that they were taken from a Romanesque church doorway at some earlier point and later reused when the gateway was constructed or repaired. The carving style is consistent with Irish Romanesque work of the twelfth century, a period when a wave of continental architectural influence produced elaborately ornamented doorways and chancel arches across the island.