The slab itself is not the mystery so much as its whereabouts within the ground that contains it, lost among overgrowth and the general disorder that old burial places accumulate over centuries. What survives in the historical record is a description from 1905 by the historian Carrigan: a fragment of a coffin-shaped, uninscribed slab carrying a cross in high relief running down its centre. That combination of form and carving style suggests a date somewhere in the 13th or 14th century, a period when such slabs, plain but carefully worked, were placed over the graves of people whose names were never cut into stone.

The graveyard sits alongside the ruins of a medieval church known, in Irish, as Teampall na Ratha, meaning the church of the rath. A rath, or ringfort, is a circular earthwork enclosure typical of early medieval Ireland, usually associated with a farmstead or settlement. The name recorded in the Ordnance Survey Letters of 1839 almost certainly refers to a ringfort that lies just 30 metres to the north of the church, making this a site where two distinct periods of Irish life, early medieval settlement and later Christian worship, ended up in very close proximity. By the time anyone looked carefully at the graveyard in 1987, it was heavily overgrown with vegetation, and the fragment Carrigan had noted decades earlier could not be located. It remains unaccounted for, neither confirmed destroyed nor confirmed present, simply absorbed into the tangle of a place that has been slowly returning to the landscape around it.