The stone is a corbel, a projecting block designed to support a beam or arch within a building, and this one is a particularly fine example. Measuring just 0.22 metres wide, it sits on a curving face and carries a human head carved with some skill: lentoid, almond-shaped eyes, a tapering triangular nose, large ears, and a flat cap. It dates probably to the fifteenth century, which means it was already several hundred years old before someone pressed it into service as ornamental rubble in a modern concrete gatepost.

How a late medieval architectural fragment ended up in a twentieth-century pillar is not recorded, but the pairing was documented when the site was visited in September 1992. A plaque on the north face of the same pillar, dated 1986, named the landowner, suggesting the gateway was a relatively recent construction at the time the stone was first noted. The surrounding area was later planted by Coillte, the state forestry company, and it was the practical demands of that forestry that eventually prompted a change. When plans were drawn up for tree-harvesting and the construction of an access road, the gateway would have needed to be widened, putting the pillar and its medieval passenger at risk. Rather than lose the carved stone, a decision was made to relocate the pillar to a safer position within the same field. That move was monitored and carried out in June 2020, with photographs from 1992 confirming that the head's main features remained intact in the intervening years, the nose damaged but the eyes, ears, and cap all still legible after more than five centuries.