Dug out of the ground here in 1898, it was reinstalled inverted, so the inscription, carved in ogham, the early medieval script that uses notches and strokes along a central stem line, reads from the top down rather than the correct bottom up. Scholars have puzzled over it ever since. An earlier reading gave the text as COVAGNI MAGI MUCOI LUGUNI, but a more recent analysis identified additional letters and proposed a fuller reading translating roughly as 'Of Thy Cuan, son of the sons of Luigne'. The stone is small, barely sixty centimetres high, and easy to overlook beside the three sandstone high crosses that also occupy this quiet rectangular enclosure.

The site takes its name from Ciarán, a saint descended from the Fiacha Araidhe of north-east Ulster, whose death is recorded in 775. The place was then known as Bealach Dúin, meaning pass of the fort, and the monastery he founded, Disert Chiaráin, a disert being a hermitage or place of withdrawal, developed into a community with a recorded succession of abbots: Siadhal died in 855, Consudh in 868, Dubhthach in 961. It was not a peaceful history. In 949 the monastery was plundered by Godfrey, son of Sitric, leading a Dublin Viking force, and in 1170 Diarmuid Mac Murrough attacked it. By the later medieval period it had become a dependency of the Crutched Friars of St John the Baptist at Kells, functioning as a parish church, and it appears in the Suppression records of 1540. By the time Bishop Dopping carried out his ecclesiastical visitation in the 1680s, the church, recorded there as Tristlekieran, was described as ruined 'since time out of mind', though it was still enclosed.

What remains today is a grass-grown rectangular structure roughly fourteen and a half metres long and seven and a half metres wide, set within a graveyard defined by earthen banks and hedges. The three sandstone high crosses are comparatively plain, decorated mainly with roll mouldings and, on two of them, some interlace work on the arms and ring. The north cross, the tallest at nearly three metres, retains its ring; the west cross has a broken southern arm and no decoration at all. A cross-slab with incised double lines forming a cross with expanded terminals rounds out an unusual concentration of early medieval stonework for a site that, according to a seventeenth-century bishop, had already been forgotten for as long as anyone could remember.