It is a fragment of medieval funerary sculpture, probably dating to the fifteenth century, and it depicts a solitary armed figure in a manner that would once have been recognised immediately by anyone who attended a high-status burial in late medieval Ireland.

The figure, as described by the art historian John Hunt in 1974, appears to represent either a knight or a gallowglass, the latter being a class of heavily armed mercenary soldiers of Hebridean origin who fought widely across Gaelic Ireland during the medieval period. He wears a long aketon, a quilted protective garment worn beneath or instead of plate armour, and a pointed bascinet, a style of close-fitting helmet common across the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In his left hand he carries both a shield and a sword, the sword distinguished by a large circular pommel and what appears to be a straight crossguard. The stone is heavily worn, and Hunt noted that the finer details are difficult to read with any certainty. On either side of the figure stand colonettes, small decorative columns with multiple mouldings at their sides, with remnants of bases still visible. This arrangement suggests the panel formed part of a chest-tomb surround, the kind of sculpted enclosure that would have framed a recumbent effigy or slab on top. Similar figured panels survive at Roscommon and at Dungiven in County Derry, placing this fragment within a wider tradition of high-quality ecclesiastical tomb carving in late medieval Ireland.

The panel is presumed to have originated in the medieval Dominican friary that once stood in Tralee, a substantial religious house whose remains now lie largely beneath the modern town. How and when the fragment was moved into the current church garden is not recorded, but its present setting in a rockery gives it an air of quiet informality that sits oddly with what it once was, part of a carefully composed monument to someone whose identity the stone is now too worn to reveal.