It is the base of a headstone, partially legible, with the numerals 1699 still visible among weathered letters. Nothing else of that date remains here, and nothing at all survives from the medieval centuries that came before it.

The site sits on a low rise above a steep northern drop, within what was once the medieval borough of Newcastle. Around the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, John Comyn, Archbishop of Dublin from 1181 to 1212, granted this foundation to the convent of Grace Dieu, an Augustinian house north of the city. Whatever ecclesiastical buildings that grant eventually produced are entirely gone. The church standing here today is a Church of Ireland parish church dating from the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, possibly built on the footprint of the earlier structure, though that connection remains uncertain. What gives the site its particular character is the graveyard itself, a triangular enclosure defined by a modern wall and bordered by the public road on its western and northern sides. Within it stands a substantial collection of early eighteenth-century headstones, a quiet concentration of local memory from a period when the medieval past had already been thoroughly buried and the Georgian present was only just beginning to take shape.

The lone 1699 fragment at the church's eastern end is easy to overlook, being only a base slab rather than a complete stone, but it is the oldest datable object on the site and the sole material trace of a burial ground that was already in use before the present church was ever conceived.