The anonymity is striking. Whoever commissioned this piece, sometime around the turn of the fourteenth century, either never got around to the inscription or never intended one.

The slab is associated with the medieval church at Grove, and was noted by the historian William Carrigan in his 1905 history of the diocese of Ossory. Carrigan described it as having a very beautiful raised cross, and his phrasing carries a suggestion of genuine admiration from a man who had seen a great many such stones. Graveslabs of this type, flat or slightly raised markers placed over a burial and often decorated with carved crosses, foliage, or effigies, were common across Ireland from the twelfth century onward. The coffin shape itself, tapering toward the foot, is a form particularly associated with the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, which gives this example a reasonably firm, if approximate, place in time. The quality of the carving, remarked upon even without close modern examination, suggests it was made for someone of some local standing, though without an inscription that person remains entirely unknown.