It is an 18th-century piece, which places it well outside the early medieval tradition of such carvings, and its current location in Churchtown is essentially a matter of accident rather than continuity.

The stone came to light in the late 1980s during the demolition of an old house somewhere near Killoughane Church. When the building came down, the carved stone emerged, but the precise location of that house was not recorded, and so any direct connection between the stone and the church nearby, though probable, cannot be confirmed. Scholars O'Sullivan and Sheehan, writing in 1996, documented the find and noted the uncertainty; the original location of the stone has since been formally classified as unknown. The 18th-century dating, attributed to J. Sheehan, is itself a detail worth pausing on. Cross-inscribed stones are most commonly associated with early Christian sites, where they marked graves, boundaries, or places of prayer. An 18th-century example suggests a later folk or devotional tradition, perhaps a gravestone or a domestic object with a religious character, repurposed or simply built into a wall and forgotten until the demolition exposed it.