When it emerged, they found not only the figure itself but the ghostly outline of a small canopied shrine that had been constructed around it, its roof profile still visible above the statue's head. The surrounding wall had been finished in smooth concrete render, probably in the early 1900s, quietly encasing the whole arrangement and then forgetting about it.

The effigy is modest in scale, roughly 65 centimetres tall and 28 centimetres wide, but finely worked. It shows a robed male figure carved in high relief, hands joined in prayer with fingers reaching to the neck, standing on a stepped semi-circular base. The face is particular: a recessed hairline, a prominent forehead, oval eyes, a broad angular nose, rounded cheeks, and what is described as a smiling slit mouth. The hair has the look of a wig, possibly the distinctive three-dimensional corkscrew curls associated with the Ormond school of sculptors, a regional workshop tradition of the late medieval period closely linked to the MacRichard Butler family. It is thought to date from the sixteenth or seventeenth century. The MacRichard Butlers built the nearby tower house known as Black Castle around 1453, and by the mid-seventeenth century the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656 described it as a fair house with castle and several turrets upon the bawn, a bawn being the fortified enclosure or courtyard surrounding such a residence, then home to Elizabeth, Lady Viscountess Dowager of Thurles. The statue may once have occupied a niche in a Butler tomb surround, or in one of the medieval parish churches nearby, or in the Carmelite Friary that stood to the east of the town until it was pulled down in the early nineteenth century. The base's concave underside and lipped edge suggest it may originally have rested on a column. The limestone was probably broken into two pieces when it was moved, sometime in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, and the effigy and base may not even be original companions, assembled together only when they were inserted into the wall. The back of the figure remains hidden in the masonry, so whether it was ever freestanding or always part of a larger structure cannot be determined.