Its eyes are deeply hollowed, its nose barely there, its mouth lightly scooped into the surface, and its chin pushed forward in asymmetrical high relief. The head itself is formed from two overlapping circular arcs, and the whole surface retains traces of diagonal tooling. It is a genuinely unsettling object, described in the records as sinister in appearance, and it is far from alone. Alongside it sits a chamfered jambstone, a dressed stone from a doorway or window surround, carved on its angled edge with a small human face: slanting oval eyes, a damaged nose, and a mouth that curves upward in something approaching a grin.

Both pieces originated on Inchbofin, a small island in Lough Ree on the Westmeath shore, where an early ecclesiastical settlement once stood. The island's monastic history places these carvings within a tradition of Romanesque and early medieval stone decoration in which human faces, often grotesque or ambiguous in expression, appear on architectural elements as apotropaic figures or simply as ornament. The depot also holds further material from the same site: two possible voussoirs, one carved with another head and one with decorative moulding, a possible jambstone with double moulding, a fragment of a sharpening stone bearing two deep grooves, and several fragments of quernstones, the hand-operated grinding stones used for milling grain, some of which carry incised decorative lines. Together they suggest a site of some architectural ambition, now reduced to labelled fragments on depot shelves.

The stones are not publicly accessible in their current location, but the ecclesiastical site on Inchbofin itself remains, and the island can be seen from the Westmeath shore of Lough Ree. The carved pieces, catalogued under depot labels including Inchbofin B3 and B4, represent the kind of detail that tends to vanish quietly into storage, surviving through bureaucratic patience rather than public attention.