The architectural historian Maurice Craig described it as a very fine late-17th century example, which places its origins well before the lodge itself was constructed around 1860. It is the kind of detail that rewards a second glance, a carved survivor displaced from one building and quietly absorbed into another.

The chimney-piece originally belonged to Kilcreen House, a now-vanished country house that stood roughly 430 metres to the south-west of the lodge. That building was demolished in the 1950s, and a hospital was subsequently built in its grounds in 1959. When the house came down, the chimney-piece was salvaged and incorporated into the lodge, which dates to around 1860 according to Mark Bence-Jones's catalogue of Irish country houses. The lodge itself was a secondary structure, built in the manner typical of Irish estates to mark an entrance or house estate staff, and the presence of a piece of 17th-century decorative stonework within it speaks to the kind of quiet salvage that often accompanied the clearance of larger houses in the mid-20th century.