The slab bears no inscription, which may be part of why a story attached itself to it: for generations it was said to mark the grave of Milo Sweetman, Archbishop of Armagh from 1361 to 1380. It is a reasonable-sounding tradition, the kind of attribution that tends to settle around an impressive, anonymous object. The problem is that it is almost certainly wrong.

When the Kilkenny historian William Carrigan examined the slab in the early twentieth century, he dated it to the thirteenth century, which would place it roughly a hundred years before Sweetman's death. Carrigan recorded it as lying within the medieval church of Newtown Earley, where it was presumably still in situ at the time of his visit. The church itself, known as Newtown Earley, is a medieval structure in the Kilkenny countryside, and the surrounding graveyard was the subject of a significant clean-up between 1985 and 1987, during which many graveslabs were uncovered and catalogued by the local historian R. Harte. This particular slab, however, does not appear in Harte's catalogue, which is a small puzzle in itself: whether it was already known, already above ground, or simply overlooked is unclear. What remains is an object older than its most famous alleged occupant, decorated in the manner of high ecclesiastical authority, and carrying a misattribution that says something about how medieval stones acquire stories when the people who placed them are long forgotten.