It is easy to miss, embedded as it is in the fabric of a relatively ordinary nineteenth-century building, yet the face itself is anything but ordinary. The carving shows a male figure with long hair cascading around the face, a headband running across the forehead, oval eyes, a triangular nose, and a narrow slit of a mouth. It is one of three carved stones incorporated into that same gable wall, and each of them almost certainly predates the church by several centuries.

The most likely origin for this head, and for its two companions, is the Dominican friary that still stands just twelve metres to the south. Founded in the thirteenth century, the friary was a substantial complex, and the Catholic church was built directly on the footprint of its western range, meaning the two buildings are not merely neighbours but are, in a very real sense, the same site at different moments in time. When the church was constructed, fragments of the older stonework were absorbed into the new fabric, the carved heads among them. Relief carving of this kind, where a figure or face projects slightly from a flat stone surface rather than being fully three-dimensional, was a common technique in medieval ecclesiastical sculpture, and examples from Irish Dominican and Franciscan houses survive across the country. What makes Lorrha particularly intriguing is the suggestion that the visible carvings may represent only part of what was reused: the external render coating the church walls could be concealing further medieval fragments that have not been seen since the building went up.

The head sits in plain sight on the east gable, south of the porch, and requires no special access to observe. Given that the church stands so close to the friary ruins, both reward attention on the same visit, and the spatial relationship between the two buildings makes the recycling of those carved stones considerably easier to picture once you are standing between them.