The object in question sits reconstructed in cut limestone, set into what is believed to be a turret of a medieval castle, and yet the deeper you look into its history, the less certain anything becomes. It is one of those sites where local tradition, place-name scholarship, and physical archaeology have tangled together over centuries into something that resists a clean explanation.

The name connects directly to the town's ancient Irish name, Tuam da ghuálainn, and nineteenth-century scholarship was already grappling with what that name meant and where exactly it pointed. The Ordnance Survey Letters, compiled by O'Flanagan, record that the spot said to have given Tuam its original name was still being pointed out in the garden of a man named John Costelloe. It was described there as the Chair of Tuam, specifically identified as the place where a member of parliament would sit after his election, Tuam having once returned a borough member to parliament. The first edition of the six-inch Ordnance Survey map names the site but does not mark it clearly, which is itself a kind of telling detail. It appears on the east side of Shop Street, entwined with the location of a tumulus, a burial mound of ancient origin, and a nearby castle. Whether the chair was ever a physical object in that garden, or whether it had always been a symbolic or linguistic idea loosely attached to a place, is genuinely unresolved. Scholars writing in the early twentieth century, including Kelly in 1904 and Ó Murchú in 1907, were already uncertain, with the suggestion that the name may have been more closely associated with the tumulus than with any parliamentary tradition. In 1980, the site was given a more formal physical presence when the limestone chair was reconstructed and incorporated into the castle structure, an act of interpretation that settled the question architecturally if not historically.