The carving shows four of the vertical dividing bars; the actual window had three. Whether this was a mason's error, a deliberate simplification, or something stranger is unclear, but the discrepancy was notable enough that the scholar H. S. Crawford, writing in 1920, remarked not only on the mistake but on the broader oddity of seeing church windows used as decorative motifs at all. It was, he observed, an unusual choice.

The fragment is thought to be part of a wall monument, possibly from an altar tomb, a type of funerary structure in which a carved chest-shaped base supports an effigy or decorative slab. R. A. S. Macalister, who examined the piece in 1913, placed it in the late seventeenth century and described its style as debased, a term used in architectural history to indicate ornamental work that has moved away from the formal conventions of an earlier period. Alongside the window imagery, the stone carries floral devices set into square recessed panels. When Macalister saw it, it was lying loose at the east end of the chancel; it has since shifted, and now rests on the ground just north of the doorway that once led into the transept. The Dominican friary at Athenry, founded in the thirteenth century, contains a number of significant medieval remains, which makes this fragment easy to overlook, partly because it is no longer upright and partly because its imagery is so understated.

Visitors to the friary ruins should look for the fragment near the transept doorway, flat on the ground. The square panels with their floral carving are worn but legible, and knowing in advance that one of those window depictions contains a four-mullioned ghost of a three-mullioned window gives the stone a quality that repays a second glance.