To the casual eye they might look like rubble, but each one is a worked fragment of Romanesque architecture, the style of rounded arches and decorative stonework that flourished in Ireland during the twelfth century. One is the base of an engaged column, a column built into a wall rather than standing free, its rounded profile still carrying an angled moulding and a horizontal groove near the top, though both are considerably worn. A second piece bears four small carved pellets. The third combines a roll-moulding, a convex rounded ridge running along the stone, with a parallel row of pellet decoration. Taken together, they represent the kind of fine ornamental work that once distinguished a significant ecclesiastical building.

The fragments were excavated from the medieval church at Kilcash, County Tipperary, and were reported by Sweetman in 1984. What makes their story particularly telling is where they were found and how they had ended up there. They came from the eastern end of the nave, close to the south-east angle, but they were no longer in their original positions. By the time the excavators reached them, the stones had been reused as building material in the construction of a later tomb. This kind of secondary use was common in medieval Ireland; dressed or decorated stonework from an earlier phase of a church could be incorporated into newer structures without any apparent concern for preserving its decorative function. The Romanesque phase of Kilcash church was effectively being cannibalised by its own later builders. The three fragments thus carry a double history, first as elements of a carefully ornamented Romanesque interior, then as convenient cut stone pressed into the service of a burial monument built generations later.