The stone was set into the east window embrasure of a ruined medieval church, a common enough practice whereby families of means claimed a prominent architectural feature as the site for a commemorative inscription. But at some point in the nineteenth century, a large vaulted burial tomb was built directly in front of it, covering most of the stone and leaving only a short section of the incised Latin text exposed to the light.

The memorial was dedicated to the Sandes family, a name associated with the Anglo-Irish landed class in Kerry. The inscription, carved in Latin in the manner typical of the period, now reads only in fragments: "Hic Jacent," meaning "here lie," followed by scattered phrases, "Sandes Qui" and "Flore Spem," the rest sealed behind masonry. At the top of the stone, an incised S-shaped spiral survives intact, a decorative motif characteristic of seventeenth-century memorial carving in Ireland. The medieval church itself is in poor condition, its ruins standing in the north-west quadrant of the graveyard, with a nineteenth-century Church of Ireland church built some thirty metres to the south, the two structures representing nearly a thousand years of layered religious use on the same ground.

The peculiar situation of the stone, partially visible, partially entombed, gives it an unintentional quality of concealment. What the full inscription once said, and how many members of the Sandes family it commemorated, remains obscured not by the passage of time alone but by the deliberate interventions of a later generation who built their own monument directly over someone else's.