The piece, a corner of gable coping from a medieval church, was recorded by a surveyor and then effectively lost among the encroaching vegetation. Nobody seems to have pinned it down since. That kind of quiet disappearance, not dramatic destruction but simple neglect and growth, is its own sort of strangeness.

The site sits at the western end of a drumlin ridge, those elongated glacially formed hills that give County Monaghan much of its lumpy, rolling character, and it carries a long ecclesiastical history. This was the location of the medieval parish church of Tullycorbet, grouped in early records with Clontibret and Aughanmullen under the designation 'Plebs de Crichmugdorn', meaning the people of Cremone, in a papal taxation carried out between 1302 and 1306 under Pope Nicholas IV. The names of some clergy connected to the church survive from as early as 1415, and by the time of the Royal Visitation of 1622, the building was noted as having been repaired. The Church of Ireland eventually replaced that older structure with a new church dedicated to St Patrick, built in 1831 under the Board of First Fruits, a body established by the Irish Parliament that funded the construction of Protestant churches across Ireland in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. That building had closed by 1907.

What remains today is a roofless ruin set within a subrectangular graveyard of roughly 100 metres by 40 metres, its boundary marked by earthen banks rather than stone walls. The graveyard is described as neglected and overgrown, which is precisely the condition that makes the carved head so elusive. It is there, in all probability, tucked among long grass or half-buried at the base of a wall, waiting for someone patient enough to look.