The fragment in question, a small piece of a tapering stone with chamfered edges, was discovered at Kells Priory in County Kilkenny built into a cobbled pathway between the east claustral range and the prior's tower. That pathway is associated with a farmstead that occupied the site in the mid- to late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, meaning the slab was already being treated as a handy building material several centuries after it was carved. Whatever inscription or imagery it once carried in full is lost; what survives is an incised cross with a portion of a trefoil terminal, the clover-like decorative flourish that commonly appears at the end of cross arms on medieval funerary stonework.

Kells Priory was founded for Augustinian canons, a religious order whose members lived communally under a rule of life derived from the writings of St Augustine. The priory complex at Kells, among the more extensive medieval ecclesiastical ruins in Ireland, produced a remarkably large collection of graveslabs, catalogued and described in detail by J. Higgins in a 2007 publication accompanying the excavation reports of T. Fanning and M. Clyne. This particular fragment is dated on stylistic grounds to the thirteenth or fourteenth century, placing its original carving within the active life of the priory community. The act of recycling it into a pathway, sometime after the priory's dissolution, was entirely practical and not unusual; dressed stone of any kind was a resource, and the identity of whoever lay beneath it had likely ceased to matter to those reusing the site for agricultural purposes.