The most striking of these is a heavily weathered sandstone carving of an open book, set above the apex of the doorway. Beside and around it sit other reused stones: a section of the head of a pointed doorway, its surface finished by punch dressing (a technique that leaves a regular pattern of small indentations across the face of the stone), and a jambstone, one of the upright stones forming the side of a door frame, similarly punch dressed. They have been incorporated into the fabric of a much later structure, which is a common enough fate for medieval stonework in Ireland, though it rarely makes the fragments easier to read.

The church into whose porch these stones were set stands beside a disused graveyard in Cahersiveen town, the graveyard itself roughly wedge-shaped and long out of use. The original medieval parish church that once occupied this site is now poorly preserved, but the carved pieces built into the later porch are thought to derive from it. The open book carving is a detail worth pausing over: as a motif it carries obvious ecclesiastical weight, associated with scripture and clerical learning, and its presence suggests the earlier building was of some local significance, even if the carved stone itself is now so weathered that its finer details have largely dissolved into the sandstone surface.