It sat above a window in the south wall, looking out over whoever passed beneath it, and it had been doing so for roughly four centuries by the time anyone thought to write it down. It is no longer there. The masonry above the window has since collapsed, and the fragment's present whereabouts are unknown.

The head is one of three architectural fragments recorded from the ruins of Kilnanare church, and it attracted the attention of the art historian Peter Harbison, who examined it in 1973. Harbison observed that the figure wears ecclesiastical apparel around the neck, which places it within a clerical tradition of carved portraiture, though the garment suggests someone of lesser rank than a bishop. The hairstyle, that conspicuous wig-like arrangement that puzzled the nineteenth-century observer, is, according to Harbison, characteristic of a style fashionable towards the end of the fourteenth century or around 1400. Medieval carved heads of this kind were commonly worked into church architecture as decorative or commemorative elements, sometimes representing donors, clergy, or figures of local significance, and their meaning was often bound up with the specific community that commissioned them. Whatever this particular figure once signified at Kilnanare, the context that might have explained it, the window surround, the wall, the masonry setting, has gone.