It is one of four such pillars recorded in the same setting, each with moulded edge shafts, the kind of decorative stonework that would once have lined a cloister walk, the covered arcade surrounding the open courtyard at the centre of a religious house. That such pieces survived at all, let alone in so domesticated a context, makes them quietly remarkable fragments of an otherwise lost world.

The pillars are presumed to originate from Tralee's medieval Dominican friary, a house whose own history has largely disappeared beneath the built fabric of the modern town. The Dominicans, a preaching order who established themselves across Irish urban centres from the thirteenth century onwards, typically constructed friaries with elaborately arcaded cloisters, and the moulded stonework of these pillars is consistent with that tradition. How exactly the fragments came to be set into the rockery of the later church garden is not recorded, though the Dominicans' continued presence in Tralee across the centuries offers an obvious, if unverified, line of continuity between the medieval friary and the modern building that now incorporates their remnants.