At some point before 1917 it ended up in a rockery in Summerhill Demesne, presumably moved there as a piece of decorative stonework with no particular regard for what it was. It was later rescued from that obscurity, along with several other dressed stones, by Beryl Moore, and kept beside a medieval cross in Summerhill village. At some point after that it disappeared again, its current whereabouts uncertain.

The plaque's original context is a little clearer. Writing in the 1830s, a commentator named Butler recorded seeing the stone set into the wall of a house near Rathmolyon. It carried two coats of arms: for the de Bathe family, a cross between four lions, and for the Thunder family, a chevron between three trumpets. A chevron is one of the oldest charges in heraldry, a simple V-shape derived from the rafter of a roof; the trumpets identify the Thunders with some specificity. Alongside the armorial plaque, on the broken shaft of what Butler described as a highly ornamented cross, ran the inscription: Orate pro anima Petri Lince SD 1554, meaning "Pray for the soul of Peter Lince." That phrase, orate pro anima, is the standard formula of a medieval memorial prayer, and its presence here ties the stonework to a specific individual and a specific act of devotion.

According to research by Moore, Peter Lince, whose family name later became Lynch, married Elizabeth Thunder of Lagore as his second wife. His will, which survives, directed Elizabeth to erect two memorial crosses after his death, one at Summerhill and one at Rathmolyon, each intended to prompt prayers for his soul. The armorial plaque almost certainly belonged to one of these commissions, combining the arms of both families in stone as a record of the marriage and a prompt to intercession. That such an object passed through a Victorian rockery and then vanished again from a village street says something about how easily the specific meanings attached to carved stone can be lost, even when the stone itself survives.