The surviving letters can be expanded to read SANCTUS, meaning "saint", though the inscription breaks off at both ends and whatever name or dedication it once announced has been lost. The slab is not in the place where it was made, nor even in the place where it was most recently stored; it has travelled a quiet, bureaucratic route across the country before ending up behind glass at the Black Mills Interpretative Centre in Roscrea, Co. Tipperary.

The three fragments were collected from various spots within the early church site at Monaincha, an island monastery set in what was once a bog a few kilometres outside Roscrea, whose Romanesque church, built in the twelfth century in the ornate Irish style of that period, still survives largely intact. At some point the fragments had been mounted on the wall of that church. They were first formally recorded in 1964, when they were held at the National Museum of Ireland, and photographs were taken at that time. In October of that year the Office of Public Works removed them from the museum, and by 1983 they had been deposited in a storage facility in Kilkenny. The scholars Elisabeth Okasha and Katherine Forsyth, who catalogued early medieval inscriptions across Ireland, noted that the lettering closely resembles that on a companion piece from the same site, known as Monaincha 5, which also appears to read s(an)c(tu)s. Whether the two slabs once formed part of the same larger monument, or simply came from the same workshop tradition, is not something the surviving evidence can settle.