B. O'Connell of Killarney pulled it free in 1939. Carved in high relief on one face was a human head, roughly 22 centimetres tall, with legible brows, nose, and mouth, and a markedly pear-shaped outline that O'Connell felt suggested a pointed beard. The nose had worn flat, but the carving was, in his words, perfectly recognisable. He found a second stone nearby, clearly a dressed door-jamb, its surface decorated with small regular pocking and cut across with a deep square groove that O'Connell believed had once accommodated a door-bar. Both stones had been reused in the same long field wall, tumbled together with the rubble of what had once been a much more densely occupied landscape.

The site sits within a cluster of monuments on and around Ardconnell Hill, a ridge whose name preserves the memory of a figure called Conal, though as Lynch noted in 1892, history and legend are otherwise silent about him. The hill is dominated by a gallaun, a tall standing stone, a single upright pillar of whinstone some 2.4 metres above ground and visible for miles in every direction. Lynch identified the townland as the Ardconail mentioned in the early medieval Book of Rights as one of the royal seats of the Kings of Cashel, which, if accepted, would make this ridge a place of considerable early importance. A large stone fort known as Cahirfert, a cashel being a roughly circular enclosure built of dry stone, once stood about 65 metres west of the gallaun, but it was levelled by a former landowner and is now gone. Further west again, across the tableland at the ridge's back, Lynch recorded the remains of an ancient burial ground, the probable location of the early church of Killeacle, though by 1892 no building fabric remained visible above ground.

The placename itself points in the same direction. The toponymist Joyce translated Killeacle as 'Church of the Tooth', an unusual dedication, and Charles Smith's 1756 map of Kerry marks a church at this location. O'Connell noted he had not yet established whether Killeacle had ever formally been a church site, but between the placename, the cartographic evidence, and the two carved architectural fragments recovered from the wall, the circumstantial case is considerable. The dressed door-jamb in particular implies a building of some ambition, its stonework described as skilful and accurate, not the work of a purely functional field enclosure.