The stone is unremarkable to look at from a distance, mortared into the south wall just east of the doorway, but the figure it bears is an oddity: a mounted warrior, sword raised, apparently issuing an order to charge, carved in a tradition quite foreign to the area around him. Writing in 1854, a researcher named Hitchcock noted the resemblance between the equestrian figure and the seal of Richard de Clare, the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman lord known as Strongbow, though he acknowledged the two figures face opposite directions.

The carving almost certainly dates from the first half of the fourteenth century. The scholar Peter Harbison, examining it in the early 1970s, picked out the details that fix it in time and place. The knight wears a surcoat, a loose garment worn over armour that was falling out of fashion by the mid-1300s, and his single visible leg rests in a stirrup, a detail Harbison took as a reliable marker of Norman identity, since native Irish horsemen of the period rode without them. The saddle, with its high front and back, closely resembles that on a small equestrian figure found at a rath at Castle Bernard in Kinnitty, County Offaly, now held in the National Museum of Ireland. Harbison was candid about the quality of the work: the proportions are poor, the knight's head as large as his torso, his leg more spindly than his arm, and the horse's forequarters so awkwardly rendered that he compared them to a pantomime costume. The reins, attached to the lower of two bands around the horse's head, vanish somewhere along the animal's neck and do not appear to reach either of the rider's hands. Flaking has erased further details, including whatever head protection the knight may once have worn. Local tradition, as recalled by one Tim Scanlon of Tralee, held that the stone was found near Galvin's Bridge in Annagh around 1820 and only later built into the church wall, which would explain its somewhat incongruous position in the fabric of a building made from the same red sandstone quarried from the adjacent mountains.