The stones are chamfered, meaning their edges are cut at an angle, and their surfaces carry the marks of a mason's tool. Most intriguingly, the slightly recessed spandrels, the triangular spaces between the arch and its surrounding frame, bear a contracted inscription in clearly legible lettering: V.D.M:A.I:HLIYVI./HV:H.ET.E.M:M.E:E/.IO. B.MH.O. What it actually means has never been satisfactorily resolved. In the 1850s, the Kerry Magazine ran the inscription across several issues, where it was misread and elaborated into what was described as a romantic tale. The stones, in other words, attracted fiction before they attracted scholarship.

The fragments almost certainly came from a castle that once stood in Castlegregory, a structure identified with the 'House of Hore' mentioned by the poet A. O'Daly in his satirical work 'The Tribes of Ireland'. By 1601, the castle was in the possession of the Hussey family. During the Cromwellian conquest, probably in 1649, a Walter Hussey garrisoned it, but when Parliament forces pressed the garrison they withdrew to Minard Castle, where they were subsequently, in the account of the eighteenth-century historian Charles Smith, 'blown up by powder'. The castle was still standing when Smith wrote in 1756, but by 1841 nothing of it remained above ground. What survives today in the garden at Egan's shop represents, in all likelihood, the only physical trace of a building whose end was abrupt and whose site has otherwise vanished entirely.