It is 1.1 metres long and just under 20 centimetres wide, broad enough to have once spanned a doorway or framed a fireplace, and along its face it carries a single date: 1641. The stone is a lintel, the horizontal beam that bridges an opening and bears the load above it, salvaged from Burncourt Castle and incorporated into this roadside wall some distance from where it originally stood.

Burncourt Castle, located roughly 70 metres to the northeast, is one of the more substantial fortified houses surviving in Tipperary. The date carved into the lintel places its origin in a precise and turbulent moment. In 1641, the Irish Rebellion broke out across Ulster and spread rapidly through the country, upending the lives of planters and Gaelic Irish alike. A house bearing that date on its stonework would have been newly built, or perhaps newly finished, at almost exactly the moment the world around it was coming apart. The castle itself was reportedly burned not long after, its brief life as a functioning residence cut short by the conflicts of the mid-seventeenth century. That a piece of its interior fabric, something that once framed a room, a threshold, a hearth, has ended up pressed into a field wall nearby is the kind of quiet irony that the Irish countryside turns up with some regularity.