The piece came originally from St. Patrick's Cathedral on the Rock of Cashel, one of the most significant ecclesiastical complexes in Ireland, and it was found among the rubble of a church on the site before being removed to the South Tipperary County Museum. How it travelled from Cashel to this quiet pastoral slope, and when, is not recorded.

The graveyard itself has two distinct layers of enclosure that speak to its long use. At its core is an earlier circular enclosure, a shape associated with early Christian burial and settlement in Ireland, where the round boundary carried spiritual as well as practical significance. Around this, a later rectangular stone wall was built, roughly 50 metres north to south and 37 metres east to west, standing about 1.4 metres high and finished with a cement cap. The headstones visible today range from 1770 to 2007, with the earliest stone sitting to the south-east of the church remains. An account recorded in the Ordnance Survey letters, compiled by O'Flanagan in 1930, noted a considerable number of headstones alongside three monumental stones lying horizontally within the burial ground, suggesting the site was already well-established and recognised as significant by that point.

The graveyard is set in pasture on a gentle east-facing slope, reached through a gate and double stile in the southern wall, with a second stile in the middle of the eastern wall. The horizontal monumental stones mentioned in the nineteenth-century account are worth looking for, as is the area around the church rubble where that displaced Cashel fragment was once found, though the fragment itself now rests in the museum in Clonmel rather than on the hillside where it was discovered.