The medieval church at Leixlip, Co. Kildare, keeps three carved stone faces embedded in its fabric, and none of them are particularly easy to find. Two sit high on the tower and stair-turret walls, while a third is set into the chancel itself, small and worn with the centuries. Taken together, they form a quietly unsettling group, each face distinct enough to suggest that whoever carved them had specific intentions, even if those intentions are now largely opaque to us.

The most formally worked of the three is the head in the south wall of the chancel, which bears a fleur-de-lys crown and is considered to be in the 13th-century style. The fleur-de-lys, a stylised lily motif common in medieval European ecclesiastical and heraldic decoration, gives this figure a degree of solemnity, perhaps indicating royalty or sainthood, though the stone is too worn for certainty. The other two heads occupy the exterior of the tower and stair-turret. One, positioned high on the north wall of the stair-turret's west end, is carved with bulging eyes and a moustache, giving it a somewhat startled or confrontational expression. The third, at the east end of the tower's north wall, is described as having a fringe of hair across the forehead, bulging almond-shaped eyes, an elongated nose, and an upturned slit of a mouth, a face that sits somewhere between caricature and unease. Carved stone heads appear frequently in Irish medieval churches, sometimes interpreted as apotropaic figures meant to ward off evil, sometimes as portrait-like commemorations, sometimes simply as the decorative impulses of skilled but anonymous craftspeople. At Leixlip, the three seem to belong to no single moment or purpose.

Visitors to the site should be prepared to look carefully and look upward. The heads on the tower and stair-turret are set high on the stonework, and their detail can be easy to miss without some patience and good light.