The move is not unusual in itself, such objects are frequently taken into safer keeping when their original setting can no longer protect them, but it gives the slab an odd double existence: an artefact of early Christian or medieval burial practice, now keeping company with a relatively modern parish residence.

The slab originated in the graveyard at Coolcashin, a site associated with a medieval church in the Lisdowney area of County Kilkenny. Cross-slabs are among the more common survivals from early medieval Ireland, typically flat stones incised with a cross, sometimes accompanied by an inscription or decorative knotwork, used to mark the graves of clergy or lay people of some standing. The Coolcashin graveyard yielded not only this slab but a fragment of a second one, suggesting the site had a degree of significance as a burial ground over a considerable period. Two such stones emerging from the same small graveyard points to a community that invested, however modestly, in commemorating its dead in stone.