The fragment almost certainly came from the medieval church that once stood on this site, long before the current landscape took shape. It sits quietly among monuments that are themselves, by the assessment of the historian William Carrigan writing in 1905, none earlier than the eighteenth century, making this displaced piece of carved stonework the oldest physical remnant on the ground.

The medieval church of Kilmanagh was replaced by a Church of Ireland building in the late eighteenth century, and the graveyard's history can be traced through its appearance on successive Ordnance Survey maps. On the first edition six-inch map of 1839, the graveyard is marked with a dashed boundary, a convention suggesting the area was unenclosed at that time. Notably, the same dashed line extends around a nearby schoolhouse and continues northward to include houses and gardens along the south side of the main street, implying that all of this ground was considered church property, whether walled or not. By the 1900 revision, the picture had changed considerably: the graveyard was shown as properly enclosed and reached by a long curving avenue running from the main street to the northeast. Carrigan, surveying the monuments inside, found a great number of inscribed stones but concluded that none predated the 1700s.

The schoolhouse that once marked the entrance to that avenue is gone, but the approach itself remains, with stone piers and flanking walls still in place at the original entry point. Anyone walking in through those piers and making their way to the northern boundary wall will find the punch-tooled fragment, an unassuming piece of worked stone that carries the memory of a church that otherwise left almost nothing standing above ground.