It is, in fact, a piece of a pointed door surround, the kind of Gothic-arched stonework that would once have framed an entrance in a medieval religious building. The fact that it ended up in a garden wall is not unusual in Irish towns with long histories; cut stone was valuable, and when a building fell into ruin or was demolished, its dressed stonework was frequently salvaged and put to new use nearby.

This particular fragment came originally from the South Abbey in Youghal, a Franciscan friary founded in the thirteenth century that once stood as one of the more significant ecclesiastical sites in the town. Youghal, a walled medieval port on the Blackwater estuary in east Cork, was home to several religious houses, and the South Abbey was among the most prominent. Like many such foundations, it suffered during the upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and what remained of its fabric was gradually dispersed, absorbed into later buildings, walls, and gardens across the town. A door surround of this kind, with its pointed arch characteristic of Gothic ecclesiastical architecture, would have belonged to a doorway of some significance within the friary complex, perhaps leading into a chapel, cloister, or chapter house.