The pieces include broken lengths of pecked and dressed limestone alongside squared and roughly worked granite blocks, averaging around 37 centimetres in length and 24 centimetres in width. They have been re-set in randomly coursed rubble, meaning they were simply bedded into the wall without any attempt to sort them by size or type, a practical reuse that has effectively frozen their identity somewhere between salvage and archaeology.

Where the stone came from remains uncertain. The site sits close to the line of Kinsale's medieval town wall, and the material may once have formed part of the nearby Carmelite friary, a mendicant religious house whose remains survive in the same part of the town. Pecked and dressed stonework of this kind, in which the surface has been worked with a pointed tool to achieve a particular finish, is consistent with medieval ecclesiastical or civic construction. Whether these blocks were quarried from the friary during a period of demolition or salvage, or whether they derive from some other structure along the town wall, has not been established. The ambiguity is characteristic of many such fragments, which survive only because someone once found them useful enough to keep, even if no one thought to record why.