It is easy to miss entirely, which makes it all the more curious once noticed: this is not rubble fill or a random fieldstone, but a finely worked piece of Gothic stonework, roughly 57 centimetres wide and 37 centimetres tall, preserving the upper portion of a two-light ogee-headed window with cusped spandrels.

To unpack the terminology briefly: a two-light window is divided by a central stone mullion into two openings, while ogee refers to the S-shaped double curve that arches over each light, a form associated with the Decorated and late Gothic styles that flourished across Ireland between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. The cusped spandrels are the small decorative projections that fill the triangular spaces between the arches and the outer frame, a detail that required a skilled mason and suggests the original building was of some consequence. Where exactly that building stood is not recorded, but the fragment is thought to have come from a medieval structure somewhere in Fethard, a town that retains one of the most complete sets of medieval town walls in Ireland and has no shortage of likely candidates, including its Augustinian friary and the collegiate church of St Mary. At some point, probably during a period of demolition or salvage, the carved stone was lifted from its original context and pressed into service as building material, ending up in a wall that has nothing medieval about it except this one small inheritance.