It is not displayed in a museum case or mounted on a civic wall, but rather recovered and resting in a working yard, the kind of place you would not ordinarily expect to find a piece of seventeenth-century civic masonry. That combination, a formal armorial inscription associated with one of the city's old gates, ending up in a space more functional than ceremonial, gives the object an atmosphere that more prominently displayed antiquities rarely carry.

The stone is known as the Mungret Gate Stone, taking its name from one of the historic entry points into Limerick. The date inscribed on it, 1643, places its making in a period of considerable tension in Irish urban history, only a year after the Confederate Ireland period began and during a time when Limerick's civic identity was being both asserted and contested. Armorial plaques of this kind, bearing a city's coat of arms, were typically set into gate structures as declarations of municipal authority and jurisdiction, marking the threshold between the governed town and the territory beyond. The Limerick City Arms carved into this particular stone would have announced that authority to anyone passing through the Mungret Gate. According to Brian Hodkinson's 2007 account, Denis Leonard of the Limerick Civic Trust recovered the stone, and at the time of writing it was being kept in the yard to the rear of the Trust's headquarters at the Bishop's Palace.

The Bishop's Palace on St Mary's Cathedral grounds is the base for the Limerick Civic Trust, and that institutional connection is worth bearing in mind if you want to get any closer to the stone itself. It is not on public display in a conventional sense, and accessing the yard would depend on the Trust's arrangements at any given time. Anyone with a particular interest in Limerick's historic streetscape, its gates, or the material culture of seventeenth-century Irish municipal life would find it worth contacting the Trust directly. The stone is not large or visually dramatic in the way a sculptural monument might be, but as a physical object that once marked the edge of a walled city, its plainness is rather the point.