The slab, along with two others, came to light during the digging of a grave in the O'Brien family plot at Latteragh Graveyard, to the north of the north wall of Latteragh Church. A fourth slab emerged separately during work on the nearby Berkery family plot. All four eventually made their way to Nenagh Heritage Centre, housed in a building on O'Rahilly Street that served as a jail before becoming a convent school.

The slabs originated at St. Odhran's Monastery at Latteragh, an early Christian site in County Tipperary. Early medieval cross-slabs are flat stones incised with a cross, often used as grave markers or devotional objects at monastic sites, and these examples follow a recognisable pattern: each bears an incised cross set within a single or double incised circle. The particular slab known as Latteragh 4, catalogued and described in detail by Dorothy Kelly in the Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland in 1988, is a rectangular piece of dense, fine-grained stone measuring 0.65 metres by 0.23 metres by 0.09 metres. Its cross has unequal arms with spatulate, or spoon-shaped, terminals, all contained within an incised circle. The collection at the Heritage Centre also includes quern stones, two of which are decorated, as well as a mortar identified as a 15th-century monastic bowl and a broken stone ring, giving the basement an accumulation that feels less like a display and more like a carefully gathered remnant of a much older landscape.