The head represented Crom Dubh, a figure from Irish mythology associated with the last harvest, and it occupied that position, set into the interior wall roughly five feet nine inches above the ground, until it was stolen in 1993. That was, notably, the second time it had been taken. It has not been recovered.

The head's primitive features have been compared by scholars, including Etienne Rynne and Peter Harbison writing in the early 1970s, to other Irish stone heads thought to be of pagan Celtic origin. Its presence in the wall of a Christian church is not as contradictory as it might first appear. Cloghane was a site of layered devotion: the church and the nearby St. Brendan's well formed part of Turas an Teampaill, a local pilgrimage circuit, and it was here, on Domhnach Chrom Dubh, the Sunday associated with the dark figure of the harvest, that a great pattern, or communal religious gathering, was held after pilgrims had completed the ascent of Mount Brandon. John O'Donovan, the nineteenth-century topographer and scholar, visited in August 1841 and noted the head carefully: a projecting stone in the wall, formed into a representation of a human head and face, set about one hundred paces west of the margin of Brandon Bay. He recorded it as locally believed to represent Crom Dubh, a belief that had apparently persisted long enough to attract thieves twice over.

What remains today is the empty socket, a tapering hollow left behind in the wall where the carved head once projected. A vertical crack runs the full height of the wall nearby, finishing at that hollow, as though the stone itself has recorded the absence. The church ruin stands on level ground close to Brandon Bay, on the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry.