The carved stone, almost certainly once a freestanding monument of some religious significance, was repurposed when the medieval church was built on a site already layered with centuries of Christian use. It is the kind of casual recycling that happened frequently in medieval Ireland, where earlier sacred stonework was folded into later construction without much ceremony, but it still gives pause when you know what you are looking at.

The site sits on rising ground with wide views to the west, north, and east, the kind of elevated position that early monastic communities in Ireland often favoured. The monastery here was known as Lecan-Midhe, and it appears in the Annals of Ulster under the year 750, when the death of Fursu, abbot of Lecan Midhe, was recorded. That entry gives the community a firm historical anchor, though the monastery itself is likely older. According to the nineteenth-century scholar John O'Donovan, drawing on the Annals of the Four Masters, it was founded by a saint named Cruimín, whose feast day fell on the 28th of June and was celebrated at Lackan. The Martyrology of Tallaght adds a second feast for the same saint on the 29th of December, suggesting he held some continuing local importance across the liturgical year. The graveyard that survives at the site continues to be used, and the medieval church stands within it, but the question of where the Early Christian monastery's enclosure ran is less settled. A low curving scarp in fields to the north and west of the church may follow the original boundary, tracing the natural contour of the slope, while the circular enclosure recorded on the south and east side of the graveyard by researcher Leo Swan in 1988 has proved difficult to locate on the ground.