It marks a grave, numbered 402 in a formal survey, but it also has a hole through its centre, which places it in a much older and more ambiguous category of object. Holed stones are found across Ireland and Britain, and their purposes have been interpreted variously as ceremonial, curative, or connected to oath-taking and binding agreements. Whether this one was always a gravemarker, or arrived at that role after a longer life elsewhere, is not recorded.

The stone came to light in 2011, when archaeologists Ann Frykler and Robert Hanbidge of Headland Archaeology Ltd. carried out a graveyard survey and logged it as Miscellaneous No. 16. Their description is brief but telling: it is partially protruding from the earth, shaped from old red sandstone, a rock type common in Kerry and formed from sediments deposited hundreds of millions of years ago. The central hole is what makes it unusual. Such features can occur naturally, but in an archaeological context, a deliberately pierced stone often signals a use that goes beyond the purely functional. Here, the stone has ended up embedded in a graveyard, its earlier history, if it has one, entirely unrecorded.