The face belongs to a bishop or abbot, identified by the mitre he wears, and it is cut into a voussoir, one of the wedge-shaped stones that would once have formed part of an arch, most likely framing a window or doorway of the Cistercian abbey that still stands roughly thirty metres to the south-west. At some point, the stone was lifted from the fabric of the abbey and repurposed here, pressed into service as a grave marker in a way that quietly conflates the medieval and the contemporary.

The abbey at Abbeyshrule was a Cistercian foundation, and the carved head almost certainly dates from the medieval period of the building's active life. The Cistercians were an austere order, generally suspicious of ornamental stonework, but figured carving did appear on doorways and windows in Irish houses of the order, particularly in later centuries when the stricter early rules had softened. The voussoir's carved face, with its ecclesiastical regalia intact, suggests it came from a significant opening in the building, perhaps above an entrance or a principal window where such decoration would have carried ceremonial weight. Its precise date of removal from the abbey is not recorded, but its current position was noted by Lennon in 2005.