Among them are sections of rib vaulting that point to a former lierne vault, a type of decorative ceiling popular in later medieval architecture in which a network of ribs, including shorter connecting ones called liernes, creates an intricate geometric pattern overhead. These pieces, along with concave mouldings and pick-dressed stone blocks, survive as physical remnants of an interior that no longer exists above ground.

The fragments are thought to have come from the medieval Dominican friary that once stood in Tralee. The Dominicans, a preaching order that arrived in Ireland in the thirteenth century, established a significant presence in the town, and their friary would have been among the more substantial ecclesiastical buildings in medieval Kerry. Lierne vaulting of the kind suggested by these fragments was a feature of more ambitious building programmes, so their presence hints at a church of some architectural ambition. That the pieces ended up in the garden of the later Dominican church on the same site speaks to a long, if complicated, continuity of occupation. The stones were catalogued as part of a 1987 urban archaeology survey of County Kerry, which brought together records of this kind of scattered, easily overlooked material.