The arrangement looks unified enough, but three of the panels are mid-seventeenth-century carvings, and the fourth, representing the Holy Ghost, is a modern addition made to complete a sequence that had been incomplete for centuries. The older carvings have a stranger history still: they were not made for this location, or even for the building before it.

The three surviving original panels, depicting God the Father, God the Son, and the Blessed Virgin, spent much of their known history moving between the Catholic institutions of Galway. They had been held in St Nicholas' church before being transferred to the Pro-Cathedral on Middle Street in the early nineteenth century, and from there they eventually found their way into the present cathedral. When the bishop Richard Pococke visited Galway in 1752, he recorded the carvings in the vestry of the church he inspected: figures cut "as big as human life", he wrote, representing Our Saviour, the Virgin Mary, and God the Father with a dove above his head, and he noted that they had been "dug up some where about the church." That detail of their being dug up suggests they may have been buried or lost for a period before anyone knew quite what to do with them. Scholars believe they were originally intended to form part of an altar or tomb-surround, a composite architectural feature that was never finished. The panel showing God the Father once included, to his right, the unfinished carvings of a dove and an angel carrying a censer, a liturgical incense vessel. Those incomplete figures were removed when the panels were re-erected in the St Nicholas chapel, tidying away the visible evidence of a project that had stalled sometime in the seventeenth century.

The chapel of St Nicholas sits within the Cathedral of Our Lady Assumed into Heaven and St Nicholas, on the west bank of the River Corrib in Galway city. The reredos, the decorative screen above the altar where the panels now hang, is the place to look; standing in front of it, it is worth bearing in mind that only three of the four figures belong to the same original scheme, and that the smooth, complete composition now visible is the result of several centuries of movement, loss, and editorial decisions made long after the original carvers had finished their work.