Carved stone faces have a long tradition in Irish ecclesiastical architecture, but they are easy to miss: tucked into corners, worn by centuries of weather, and rarely given the same attention as the grander fabric of a medieval church. Leixlip's Church of Ireland building contains three such heads, each with its own distinct character and each placed in a different part of the structure, suggesting they were not conceived as a matching set but accumulated or positioned at different moments in the building's life.

The most formally dressed of the three sits in the south wall of the chancel, a small and now considerably worn head wearing a fleur-de-lys crown, a motif that places it stylistically in the thirteenth century. The fleur-de-lys, the stylised lily emblem widely used in medieval European heraldry and religious iconography, would have carried clear associations with royalty and the Virgin Mary in a church context. The second head is positioned high on the north wall of the stair-turret's west end, and where the chancel carving is regal, this one is distinctly expressive: bulging eyes and a moustache give it an almost comic vitality. The third, set into the north wall of the tower at its eastern end, is perhaps the most arresting of the group. Its carver gave it a fringe of hair across the forehead, the same bulging quality to the eyes but shaped here into elongated almonds, an elongated nose, and a mouth rendered as a tight upturned slit, which produces an oddly tense, ambiguous expression somewhere between a grimace and a grin.

Those visiting Leixlip church should be aware that two of the heads are placed at height, on the stair-turret and the tower wall respectively, which means patience and a good angle are needed to make them out. The chancel head, being at a lower level in the south wall, is the most accessible of the three. Looking carefully at each in turn, the differences in style and workmanship become apparent, raising quiet questions about who carved them, and why three such different faces ended up watching over the same building.