It has been cut and shaped on most of its faces, but one surface was left rough, and on that uncut face someone carved the inscription "RCAC 1690". On the flat top, the single letter "B" is cut deeply into the stone. The block measures roughly half a metre tall and not much more than thirty centimetres wide, a modest thing by any measure, yet it has been marking a grave for well over three centuries.

What the initials "RCAC" signify is not recorded, though the formula, initials followed by a year, was a common enough approach to commemorating the dead in late seventeenth-century Ireland, when carved lettering on stone was beginning to replace or supplement simpler unmarked grave slabs. The year 1690 places this stone in one of the more turbulent periods of Irish history, the year of the Williamite wars and the Battle of the Boyne, though there is nothing in what survives to connect this particular burial to those wider events. The Ordnance Survey Letters, compiled in the nineteenth century and later transcribed by O'Flanagan in a 1927 typescript, noted that the stone was standing at the head of an old grave, which at least confirms it was recognised and recorded even then as something worth noting down.