The stone's decorated face bears fluting that most likely once formed part of a pleated gown on an effigial tomb, the kind of carved recumbent figure common to medieval ecclesiastical monuments, where the deceased was rendered in stone with careful attention to the folds and drape of their clothing. How a fragment of what was probably a funerary monument came to be built into a field gateway is not recorded, but the gateway itself has since collapsed, leaving the stone among the debris at the entrance to a field that also contains the remains of a castle and a 17th-century house.

The fragment does not survive alone. A second carved limestone block, almost certainly from the same original context, has been repurposed as a coping stone, the flat-laid stones that cap and protect a wall or gable end, on the north side of the west gable of the old church directly across the road. The two pieces, separated by no more than the width of a country road, likely began as parts of the same monument before being broken up and absorbed into the practical life of the surrounding buildings at some point after the monument's original setting was disturbed. Whose tomb the carving once memorialised, and where that tomb originally stood, remains unknown.