The figure is actually the covering stone of an effigial tomb, a slab carved in relief with the likeness of the person interred beneath, a form common across medieval Ireland and Britain. This one depicts a clergyman dressed in a chasuble, the sleeveless outer vestment worn during Mass, its folds rendered in the formalised, linear style typical of medieval stone carving, with the cowl of the alb visible above the neckline. It stands roughly five feet tall, which is to say that is what remains of it. The head was knocked off at some point in the past, the hands have also disappeared, and yet locally the figure has never lost its identity. People in the area have long called it "St. Feechra's Statue".

The historian William Carrigan, writing in 1905, documented the effigy and its immediate surroundings in some detail. The first Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1839 shows a small building immediately to the north, labelled as St. Fiachra's Church, and the effigy stood just to its south. That building was demolished in 1869 to make way for the Kenny Purcell monument, a mortuary enclosure whose entrance wall the stone figure now stands beside. A photograph published by Carrigan shows the effigy in exactly this position, upright against the enclosure wall, already headless, already attributed to the local saint. Based on comparisons with similar carved figures elsewhere in Ireland, scholars have dated this type of effigial stonework to somewhere between the mid-thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, placing its origins in the high medieval period, well before the disruptions that would scatter and damage so many such objects across the island.

The effigy sits within the graveyard associated with the church of St. Fiachra, a site that has clearly accumulated layers of use across many centuries. The Kenny Purcell enclosure that now frames the figure is itself a later intrusion into what was already an older sacred landscape, which means the headless ecclesiastic now keeps company with monuments from several different eras, each one having displaced or absorbed something that came before it.