They were once the hood-mould stops of the medieval church that still partially stands nearby, small decorative terminals flanking a moulding above a doorway or window, and they ended up in the wall after being recovered as loose architectural fragments from the ruin itself. The church they came from is in a poor state, crudely built by medieval standards, but the detail invested in those carved faces hints that it was not always so neglected.

When the antiquarian John O'Donovan visited in 1838, he noted two lancet windows, the tall narrow pointed openings characteristic of early Gothic architecture, one in the east gable and one in the north wall. Even then the east window was lost behind dense ivy, and the top of the north window was already gone. By the time a formal inspection was carried out in June 1983, the surviving fabric had been reduced to the north side-wall, the east gable, and a short return of the west gable measuring just 1.2 metres. A stretch of south wall roughly six metres long that O'Donovan had recorded had by then vanished entirely from the surface. The ivy, meanwhile, continued to advance, eventually swallowing both windows from view. Google Earth imagery from June 2009 showed that much of the ivy had since been cleared from the east gable, bringing the lancet window there back into sight after well over a century of concealment. A sillstone recovered from the church, now also set into the graveyard wall alongside the carved heads, has been dated on stylistic grounds to the thirteenth century, suggesting the building, or at least part of it, belongs to that period. The ground to the north of the church is locally understood to have served as a children's burial ground, a cillín in Irish tradition, a practice of burying unbaptised infants in marginal or liminal spaces that was once widespread across rural Ireland.