What makes its situation quietly strange is the company it keeps: the stone is surrounded by ogham stones, ogham being an early Irish script carved as a series of notches along a stone's edge, most commonly dating from the fourth to the seventh centuries. The combination of a cross-decorated recumbent stone and ogham-inscribed uprights, arranged together beneath cedars on a nineteenth-century estate, is not the kind of thing the landscape typically offers up without some explanation.

The cedar grove was planted in 1812 by the Dowager Lady Dunraven when she first came to Adare, giving the setting its present character, but the cross-inscribed stone itself had a stranger journey to get there. It originated near a ringfort, a roughly circular enclosed settlement typical of early medieval Ireland, in the vicinity of Ballydavid in County Kerry, some distance to the south-west. Around 1816, a man digging in the area unearthed it from about 1.2 metres below the surface. Rather than drawing attention to his find, he built it quietly into a ditch and told nobody, believing that keeping it secret would bring him good luck. The story only came to light later, relayed by a coastguard officer named Kennedy, stationed at Ballydavid, and was recorded by Dunraven in 1865. The stone measures roughly 1.06 metres in length and 0.81 metres in breadth, and the same 1865 publication includes a drawn record of its decorated surface.

The stone now sits within the demesne of Adare Manor, which means access depends on the estate's current arrangements with visitors. The cedar grove gives the spot a particular quality of enclosure; the trees, now well over two centuries old, create a dim, resinous atmosphere that the open parkland around it does not prepare you for. The cross and motifs on the stone's surface are incised rather than raised, so good light, ideally low and raking across the face of the stone, is worth waiting for if you want to read the decoration clearly.