What makes this particular shelter unusual is what has been built into it: carved stonework salvaged from at least three entirely separate monuments, assembled into an unlikely collage of medieval and early modern craftsmanship. The most striking of these fragments is a side panel from a chest tomb, probably dating to the sixteenth century, decorated with blind ogee-headed panels and lierne vaulting. Lierne vaulting, a decorative technique in which short ribs connect the main structural ribs of a vault in star-like or net-like patterns, was more commonly applied to ceilings and roof spaces than to tomb furniture, which makes its appearance on a side panel an object of quiet curiosity in itself.

The chest tomb panel is thought to have originated inside Abbey Owney, a monastic site in Abington, before finding its way to Cappercullen. Its lierne vaulting pattern closely resembles that on the MacGillaptrick effigial tomb at Grangefertagh Church in County Kilkenny, which has been dated to between 1510 and 1540, offering a plausible bracket for this Limerick example. Two other carved elements in the shelter have different origins altogether. A carved image of St. Bernard was taken from the Walsh wall monument, part of the Walsh family mausoleum at Owney Abbey, while a crucifixion scene may have come from the seventeenth-century Barry wall tomb, as noted by Seymour in 1907. The stone itself is a cut limestone that was locally described as marble; Loeber identified the likely source as quarries in the barony of Clanwilliam, and the marble quarry at Caherline and Ballyhobin, recorded in the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, may well have supplied the material for several of the memorials now associated with the Abington graveyard.

The shelter sits at Cappercullen, and the mass rock it covers gives the site its primary religious significance for many visitors. The repurposed tomb carving is easy to overlook if you are not specifically looking for it, so it is worth taking time with the stonework of the shelter itself rather than moving past it quickly. The ogee-headed panels on the chest tomb fragment are on the side rather than the face, and the lierne vaulting detail is small in scale. Abington graveyard and the ruins of Abbey Owney are nearby, and the wider area rewards a slow look at the carved stonework across several sites rather than a single focused visit to any one of them.