It is not where it began its life, nor even where it spent most of the last century, and that layered displacement is part of what makes it interesting. Carved in relief on a recessed panel of green stone, the head occupies what was originally the sloping underside of a corbel, a projecting bracket used in medieval architecture to support weight from above. The block itself is modest in size, roughly 41 centimetres by 24, and the finish is deliberately rough on all surfaces except the one that mattered: the face.

The stone's recent history is easier to trace than its distant origins. Around 1980, a gateway on the western side of Barrack Lane was demolished. This gateway had incorporated the carved stone as the centrepiece of its arch, a secondary use that was itself already a removal from somewhere earlier. The stone was taken to a house in Chambersland for safekeeping. Then, during road realignment works carried out between roughly 1995 and 2000, it was set into a wall facing onto the road, where it remains today. Where it came from before the gateway is less certain. The stone is thought to have originated from a church, and its character is certainly medieval, meaning the face gazing out from that corbel panel may once have looked down from a height inside or above a religious building, performing the kind of apotropaic or decorative function that such heads served throughout the medieval period in Ireland and Britain.