The block, roughly 72 centimetres tall and just over 20 centimetres wide, bears a carved male figure in relief: he wears a pleated skirt and a cloak drawn under his right arm and falling in folds across the chest, while his right hand grips a banded staff with what looks like a buckle or purse just below the fingers. The feet, shoulder, and chest are uncarved, left in the raw stone, and beneath the figure a small recessed panel carries three rosettes. The top of the block has been cut away entirely, taking the head with it.

The sculpture was dug up, probably during the 1970s, in the garden of the Christian Brothers monastery nearby, and was recorded in its current schoolyard location before 1978. Its earlier history is a matter of reasoned guesswork. The scholar John Bradley, writing in 1983, argued that the block was originally set into a wall rather than free-standing, and that its size rules out the kind of chest tomb common in medieval Irish churches. He proposed instead that it may once have formed part of a cloister arcade, perhaps belonging to the Dominican friary known locally as the Black Abbey, which stands not far away. A second possibility he raised is that the figure depicts St James of Compostella, the pilgrim saint usually shown with a staff and purse, and that the sculpture could have been displayed in the wall of St James' Gate at the western end of James' Street. Bradley dates the carving on stylistic grounds to the mid-fifteenth century, though he notes that the rosettes beneath the figure are a decorative motif more typically seen in work from the sixteenth century, which leaves the precise date slightly open.