They are not decorative. Each one bears the marks of diagonal stone tooling and four carved lugs, the kind of careful craft that suggests original purpose rather than ornament. They are, in effect, survivors: physical remnants of a Carmelite friary that has otherwise left no trace above ground.

The abbey was founded by Odo, son of Nellan O'Molloy, who died in 1454. The O'Molloys were a significant Gaelic family in the midlands, and patronage of a religious house was both a pious act and a statement of local authority. The Carmelites, a mendicant order who arrived in Ireland during the thirteenth century, established communities under exactly this kind of noble sponsorship. What became of the friary after the dissolution of the monasteries in the sixteenth century is not spelled out, but the modern Roman Catholic church now occupies its footprint, and two further objects from that earlier period have survived into the present. A stone sculpture from the sixteenth century, depicting the crucifixion with a vine motif, is set into the churchyard wall alongside the mortars. Inside the church, a wooden pietà, also attributed to the sixteenth century and possibly of Italian origin, adds a further layer of quiet incongruity to an otherwise unremarkable parish building. A pietà is a devotional image of the Virgin Mary cradling the body of Christ, a form more commonly associated with continental European religious art than with rural Irish interiors, which makes its presence here genuinely curious.