The original stone was no casual landmark; it was a deliberate territorial marker, dividing the jurisdiction of the city from the lands of St. Mary's Abbey, and its origins reach back further than the abbey itself.

According to Clarke, the stone was erected by the Vikings during the 9th or 10th century, making it one of the earlier pieces of urban boundary-marking in the Dublin area. That a Norse settlement would need to formalise its limits in stone is itself telling; it suggests a level of administrative organisation that sits at odds with simpler popular images of Viking Dublin as purely a place of raid and trade. St. Mary's Abbey, the Cistercian monastery that eventually claimed land on the northern bank of the Liffey, was founded considerably later, in the 12th century, yet the boundary the Vikings established apparently remained meaningful enough to define monastic jurisdiction well into the medieval period. The original stone has not survived, but the fact that its location was recorded and that a replica was later placed there points to a local awareness that something genuinely old and particular once stood on that ground.

The site is marked by a modern replica, which serves as the practical indicator for anyone wanting to locate it today. It sits within Dublin's south city, though precise street-level directions are not well documented in the available sources, so some local enquiry may be needed. The replica itself is less the attraction than the thought it prompts: that the street layout, the parish limits, and the neighbourhood boundaries of a modern city may still be tracing lines first drawn by people who arrived in longships more than a thousand years ago.