The surviving inscription reads only a handful of characters, but scholars Elisabeth Okasha and Katherine Forsyth have argued that what remains can be expanded to SANCTUS, the Latin word for "saint", and that the carving may have originally spelled out a dedicatory or commemorative formula of the kind common on early medieval ecclesiastical slabs in Ireland.

The stone comes from Monaincha, an early church site in County Tipperary associated with a Romanesque church whose carved stonework is among the more accomplished of its period in the country. The slab, catalogued by Okasha and Forsyth as Monaincha 6, was broken into three fragments and had already been dispersed around the site before it was first formally recorded in 1964, when the pieces were held by the National Museum of Ireland. A file was opened, photographs were taken, and the fragments were noted as having been found "in various places" across the early church site before being mounted on the wall of the Monaincha church. In October 1964 the Office of Public Works removed the fragments from the museum; by 1983 they had been transferred to a depot in Kilkenny. The lettering on this slab closely resembles that of another stone from the same site, Monaincha 5, which also appears to carry an abbreviated form of sanctus, raising the possibility that the two were produced by the same hand or workshop.

The slab is currently on display at the Black Mills Interpretative Centre in Roscrea, where it can be seen alongside other material from the region. Monaincha itself lies outside the town on what was once an island surrounded by bogland, now largely drained, and the Romanesque church there remains a striking presence in the landscape.