It was found inside a chimney breast when an old cottage was pulled down, and at some point afterwards was repurposed as the pivot stone for a gate, the kind of unglamorous second career that has preserved many an awkward-shaped piece of masonry from complete loss.

Despite the damage it has sustained, the stone tells a coherent story. It was originally the end-stone of a flat-arched fireplace mantle, the terminal piece that completed one side of the surround. Its decoration is restrained but precise: a shallow recessed panel edged with ovolo mouldings, those convex quarter-round profiles popular in late Renaissance stonework, following the L-shaped outline of the piece, with a roll moulding along the inside edge of the angle. The style is consistent with late sixteenth or early seventeenth-century craftsmanship, a period when tower houses and fortified houses across Munster were being fitted out with carved stone details that announced both wealth and a degree of architectural ambition. The puzzle is that no tower house or fortified house is known to have survived in the immediate area, leaving the stone's precise origin unaccounted for. It may have been carried some distance, salvaged from a demolished or ruined structure whose location is no longer traceable, and worked into a later cottage fireplace before beginning its life as gate hardware.

The fragment is now in private ownership, which means it is not accessible to the public in any straightforward sense. Its value lies less in what can be seen today than in what it implies: that a building of some pretension once stood somewhere in this part of Kerry, leaving behind a single decorated stone as its only surviving evidence.