The stone records the death of one Mathew Cain on the seventh day of November, Anno Domini 1607, a date that puts it only a few years after the end of the Nine Years' War and well before the more familiar swept-top and winged-soul headstones that became common across Ireland in the eighteenth century. That a legible, formally inscribed stone survives from this period at all is quietly remarkable; most memorialisation from early seventeenth-century Ireland was confined to the church interior or to the estates of the powerful.

The graveyard at Tankardstown sits in undulating countryside and is rectangular in plan, enclosed by a stone wall. At its centre stand the ruins of Tankardstown Church, and it is in the eastern quadrant of this enclosure that the Cain headstone stands. Immediately to its south is a second seventeenth-century memorial, this one to a Samuel Cooper, which means the two stones form a small, unusually early cluster within the same corner of the graveyard. The juxtaposition of the names Cain and Cooper side by side is itself quietly suggestive of the mixed social and religious landscape of Laois in the decades following the Plantation of Leinster, though the stones themselves offer no further detail on the matter.