The slab dates to the seventeenth century and now rests in the grounds of the contemporary Dominican church in Tralee, yet its origins almost certainly lie elsewhere, somewhere older and long since gone.

The stone is believed to have come from the medieval Dominican friary that once stood in the town, a community of friars whose presence in Tralee preceded the current church by several centuries. By the seventeenth century, when this slab was carved, the friary was already in steep decline; the Reformation and the upheavals of the Tudor conquest had dismantled or displaced most of the country's mendicant houses. That a graveslab from this period survived at all suggests it was kept, moved, or perhaps simply never lost. Gravestabs of this type were typically flat, inscribed or decorated stones laid horizontally over a burial, and they were often the most durable record left of an individual interment when the surrounding structure did not endure. This one endures in the garden of the institution that, in a sense, carries forward the same religious tradition, even if the physical continuity between the medieval friary and the present church is broken.