Originally from the ecclesiastical site on Inchbofin, an island on Lough Ree in Co. Westmeath, these fragments ended up in the care of the Office of Public Works, catalogued with labels like B3 and B4, their island origins reduced to depot shorthand. What makes them arresting is not their displacement but what was cut into them: human faces, worked into architectural stone by medieval hands, now waiting out their days in storage.

The most striking of the group is a voussoir, one of the wedge-shaped stones that form the curve of an arch, bearing a face with deeply hollowed eyes, a barely discernible nose, and a lightly hollowed mouth. The chin is asymmetrical and carved in high relief, and the head itself is defined by the arcs of two circles rather than any naturalistic outline. The carving has a rough, unsettled quality to it. A second piece, a chamfered jambstone, a doorway upright with an angled edge, carries a smaller face on the chamfer itself: slanting oval eyes, a damaged nose, and a wide mouth curving upward. Alongside these are a possible jambstone with double moulding, two further voussoirs, one carrying another head and one a decorative moulding, a fragment of a sharpening stone with two deep grooves worn into it, and pieces of quernstones, the flat circular hand-mills used for grinding grain, several of which bear incised lines suggesting they were decorated as well as functional. The ecclesiastical site from which all of this came, on Inchbofin in Lough Ree, was clearly a place where stone was worked with some ambition and care.