Just over a metre and a half long and roughly forty-four centimetres wide, it is unremarkable at first sight, the kind of displaced block that turns up in old ruins everywhere. What sets it apart is a small, precise detail: a regular notch, about eight centimetres wide, cut near the end of one side. That notch is the clue. The stone is thought to have once served as a door lintel, the horizontal beam spanning the top of a doorway, and the notch may reflect how it was seated or fitted into the surrounding masonry. Separated from its original position and purpose, it now lies horizontal in the nave, a fragment whose function has to be inferred rather than read.

The church it belongs to is part of a larger Early Christian and Medieval ecclesiastical complex at Kilmalkedar, known in Irish as Cill Maoilchéadair, situated at the foot of the western slopes of Reenconnell hill on the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry. The Reenconnell ridge rises to 907 feet to the north-east, and spurs of the hill shelter the site on both its northern and southern sides, creating a tucked-away quality that helps explain why an ecclesiastical community chose to settle here. The complex overlooks Smerwick Harbour. The stone itself was catalogued by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey, a comprehensive study of the Corca Dhuibhne region, and it is from that record that the measurements and the tentative identification as a lintel derive. The word "may" in that identification matters. Without the original context of where the stone stood and how it was used, certainty is out of reach.