A pointed limestone arch, its tracery cut into open, flame-shaped forms, frames two small carved panels, each only about forty centimetres high and twenty-five centimetres wide. The figures within them, a bishop gripping a cross-staff on one side and the Virgin seated with the Christ child on the other, are rendered in false relief, a technique in which the forms are carved to suggest three dimensions without being fully detached from the background stone. Above each figure rises a crocketed niche, the little projecting knobs of foliage that were a standard ornament of late Gothic stonework. The whole assembly has the character of something displaced, a remnant of a grander object that no longer exists in its original form.

The arch and its panels date to the fifteenth century and are thought to have belonged to an ornate tomb. Scholars have suggested it may originally have stood on the west wall of the friary's transept, which would place it among the more prominent commemorative monuments of a friary founded by the MacNamara family and closely associated with the great Gaelic lordships of Clare. The moulded chamfered jambs that support the arch, stonework shaped with a recessed diagonal cut along its edges, hint at the care and expense invested in whatever the full monument once looked like. Perhaps the most quietly compelling detail is a mason's mark carved on the east face of the Virgin and Child panel: a triskele of leaves arranged in a circle, a personal signature left by the craftsman who shaped the stone. Such marks are occasionally found on medieval buildings and monuments across Ireland and Europe, used by individual masons to identify their work, possibly for the purpose of payment. This one has survived intact for more than five centuries.