It would be easy to pass it without a second glance. Look more closely, however, and the surface reveals punch tooling, a decorative technique in which a pointed tool was struck repeatedly into the stone to produce a textured or patterned finish. The style is typical of the late medieval period, which means the fragment almost certainly began its life as part of a church that no longer exists.

The graveyard is associated with the medieval church of Kilmanagh, which was replaced by a Church of Ireland building in the late eighteenth century. The old structure did not survive even that long intact. The Ordnance Survey Letters of 1839 record a local account that the old church of Kilnamanagh had been torn down around 1809, its stone carted away to provide building material for the parsonage house of the parish. This was not an unusual fate for medieval ecclesiastical buildings in the post-Reformation period; once a congregation had moved to a new church, the old fabric became a convenient quarry. What is slightly unusual here is that at least one carved piece found its way into the graveyard wall rather than disappearing entirely into domestic construction, preserving a fragment of the medieval building within the bounds of the site it once served.