The face is male, with long hair curling up at the ends, though the features themselves have been worn down to near-abstraction by time and weather. What remains is enough to read the craft behind it, even if the craftsman's intentions are harder to recover.

The fragment is a decorated capital, the carved block that sits at the top of an engaged column, a column that is built into a wall rather than standing free. It dates to the thirteenth century and is thought to have come from Emly's former cathedral, a building whose significance outran its later fate. Emly was once an important ecclesiastical site, and the cathedral it once possessed was evidently a building of some architectural ambition. The capital probably functioned at the springing of an arch, the point where an arch begins to curve away from its support, likely as part of an inner window embrasure, the recessed opening set into a thick wall to admit light. Two other carved-head fragments from the same cathedral survive nearby, suggesting that whoever built the church boundary wall had access to a scatter of salvaged medieval stonework and thought at least some of it worth preserving in place rather than discarding.

The fragment is built into the wall near the east gable of the church, visible on the south face of the northern boundary of the churchyard. It is easy to pass without registering what it is, which is perhaps fitting for a piece of sculpture that has spent most of its life embedded in a structure never designed to show it off.