It is one of several such carvings embedded or reinserted across the fabric of this ruined parish church in County Kilkenny, where centuries of use, partial destruction, and modern consolidation have left a building that reads almost like a palimpsest in limestone.

Dedicated to the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, Rosconnell served as a parish church whose early medieval origins were bound up almost immediately in questions of ecclesiastical ownership. Between 1194 and 1224, a local landholder named William St. Leger granted six carucates, a carucate being a unit of land broadly equivalent to what one plough team could work in a year, of his land at Rossconnell to the Abbey of St. Thomas's in Dublin. The grant was confirmed in 1224 and leased in 1230, yet the parish itself was never formally appropriated to the abbey; the Red Book of Ossory, a medieval diocesan register, makes clear that the right of presentation remained with the Bishops of Ossory. The oldest surviving fabric in the chancel, including a triple-light trefoil-headed window set within a round-arched embrasure in the east gable, dates to the thirteenth century, and the chancel's east window is flanked externally by two sculptured heads. By 1839, when Ordnance Survey correspondents recorded their observations, the west gable had been levelled entirely, though a chancel arch some eleven feet wide and eleven feet high, built of well-cut stone, still stood in the middle gable. Within sixty years it was gone. A plaque over the south doorway commemorates a rebuilding of the church carried out in 1646, suggesting the community was still investing in the structure just a few years before Cromwellian forces destroyed it in 1650. The nave shows masonry of at least two phases, with the east end of its north wall reading as fifteenth-century work, while a large opening nearly five metres wide in the same wall may indicate a former side chapel, subsequently blocked and then partly reopened with a smaller inserted arch of which only one jamb and its springer survive.

FÁS, the Irish state training agency, undertook extensive reconstruction between 1984 and 1987, and further landscaping and stone recording followed in 2005 and 2006. The result is a building that mixes original medieval fabric with modern consolidation in ways that reward slow, close attention. The opposing doorways in the chancel, unusual for a parish church of this period, the ogee-headed window in the nave dressed with punch tooling, and the scattered sculptured heads, some inserted, some reused, give the ruins a layered quality that repays looking beyond the tidied exterior.