At just over three metres wide and two and a half metres high, it is not a modest thing, yet it tends to go unremarked beside the broader drama of a medieval friary church. What makes it worth pausing over is the quality of the stonework: three-centred moulded arches carried on slender columns, with decorative carving that draws from more than one architectural moment at once.

The ornamental vocabulary of the niche and its two neighbours is a mixture of Romanesque and Transitional styles, terms that describe the gradual shift in European ecclesiastical architecture during the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, when the rounded forms of Romanesque began to give way to the pointed arches and vertical emphasis of Gothic. Here, the two sensibilities coexist in the carved detail: foliage, nail-head, chevron, and cable patterns, each of which belongs to that transitional phase rather than to any later period of modification or repair. That decorative consistency across all three niches points, according to research by McKeon, to the initial construction of the church, which the Dominican friars of Athenry began around 1241. R. A. S. Macalister, writing in 1913, described the structure as a handsome one, a judgement that still holds when you stand in front of it.

The church itself is a roofless ruin in state care, and the south wall of the nave where the three niches sit is largely intact. The carvings are set at a height that rewards close looking rather than a quick glance from the nave floor, and the westernmost niche retains enough detail in its mouldings to make the individual motifs legible even after nearly eight centuries of exposure.