It is not an ornament placed there by design so much as a survivor, slotted into the east wall of a single-storey outbuilding at some point in the past by someone who either recognised its age or simply found it useful. The face is carved in relief on a voussoir, the wedge-shaped stone normally used in the construction of an arch, which suggests it once formed part of a very different structure entirely.

The farmstead itself was built around 1850 and later served in part as a public house, a not unusual combination in rural Ireland. It is a substantial six-bay two-storey house with a crenellated parapet above a flat-roofed porch, and a spread of single-storey outbuildings running at a right angle to the main house. The carved head sits in the north end of one of these outbuildings, adjacent to a road. Roughly 145 metres to the north-east, a bullaun stone and a font, both originally from the medieval church at nearby Churchtown, have also ended up in the farmyard landscape, suggesting this corner of County Westmeath has long been a kind of informal repository for displaced ecclesiastical stonework. A bullaun is a boulder or stone slab with one or more artificial cup-shaped hollows, often associated with early Christian sites and sometimes with folk healing practices.

As for the carved head itself, its origins remain genuinely uncertain. Stone heads of this kind, displaced from their original architectural or ritual contexts, are notoriously hard to date by appearance alone. Stylistically similar carvings have been produced across an enormous span of time, anywhere from the Iron Age through to the post-medieval period, and without a clear provenance the face at Gneevestown gives little away. What is clear is that it did not begin its life in a farmyard wall, and whatever building or monument it once belonged to has long since disappeared.