Roughly the size of a large hardback book, it is carved with a woman's face, worn by centuries of exposure but still legible in its details. She has oval eyes, a prominent nose, and an open mouth with teeth showing. A thick band frames her face and continues beneath the chin in the manner of a barbette, a cloth headdress fastened under the jaw that was fashionable in medieval Europe. She appears also to be wearing something resembling a pill-box cap, with hair visible on either side. Triangular carvings at the neck suggest a collar of some kind. The carving is described as being in false relief, meaning the face is not fully sculpted in the round but rather pressed out from a flat surface, giving it a slightly flattened, frontal quality.

The stone is thought to be a corbel, one of the projecting blocks built into walls to carry the weight of beams, arches, or other structural elements. Carving faces on corbels was a common medieval practice, and the level of detail on this example suggests it came from a building of some significance. Its exact origin is uncertain. Three medieval structures stand within roughly eighty metres of it. The nearest is a medieval church, now reduced to a grassed-over mound about seventy-seven metres to the north. There is also a tower house approximately eighty metres to the south-west, and a further substantial medieval building around seventy-two metres to the south-east. Any one of them could have been its original home. At some point, and by some unrecorded means, the carved block ended up in the grounds of Kilrush House, separated from whatever wall or vault once held it in place.