It is easy to miss, partly because it has been absorbed into the fabric of Grave No. 48 as though it were just another building block, and partly because nobody passing through would necessarily know what they were looking at. Holed stones are a recurring enigma in the Irish archaeological landscape; they appear in various contexts, from boundary markers to objects associated with oath-taking, healing rituals, or the sealing of contracts, and their specific original function is rarely recoverable. This one retains no context beyond the fact of its careful, intentional shaping.

The graveyard at Kilquane sits on a gently westward-sloping patch of pastureland on the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry, roughly 8.7 kilometres northwest of Dingle town and about 2.3 kilometres southeast of Feohanagh. To the east, Mt. Brandon, the tallest peak on the peninsula, rises above the site. In 2011, archaeologists Ann Frykler and Robert Hanbidge of Headland Archaeology Ltd. conducted a graveyard survey and catalogued the stone under the designation Miscellaneous 03, describing it as a small, portable, sub-square piece of stone with a hole carved in its centre. That it was portable, and that it ended up built into a tomb of uncertain date, suggests a long and undocumented journey before anyone thought to record it formally.