What survives reads something close to SANCTUS AE, the name of a saint whose identity has been worn away entirely, leaving only the honorific and the first syllable or two of whoever was once commemorated there. It is a quietly unsettling object: a formal act of naming, reduced by time to little more than a grammatical title.

The slab, broken into three fragments, was first recorded in 1964 when it came to the attention of the National Museum of Ireland. According to scholars Elisabeth Okasha and Katherine Forsyth, the pieces had been found at various points around the early church site at Monaincha, a place of considerable religious significance in medieval Tipperary, and had at some stage been mounted on the wall of the Romanesque church there. Romanesque in this context refers to the round-arched, elaborately carved architectural style that flourished in Ireland during the twelfth century, and the church at Monaincha is one of its finer surviving examples. The abbreviation visible on the slab, a contracted form of sanctus meaning saint, follows conventions found elsewhere in early Irish epigraphy; a comparable usage appears in the genitive form on an inscribed slab from Kilbrecan on Aran Mór. In October 1964 the fragments were removed from the museum by the Office of Public Works, and by 1983 they were being held in a depot in Kilkenny. The slab has since been relocated and is now on display at the Black Mills Interpretative Centre in Roscrea, some distance from the boggy island site where it originated.