The inscription reads OR DO MAELBRENDAIN, a formula in Old Irish meaning "a prayer for Maelbrendan", and the letters are deeply cut into the stone by pocking, a technique in which a sharp tool is struck repeatedly to punch out the surface rather than carve a clean groove. What makes the object quietly arresting is the economy of it: the inscription occupies only a small portion of one end of the slab, as if the carver needed very little space to say what mattered.

The slab did not begin its life in An Fhairche. It originally stood in the graveyard at Rosshill Abbey, around a kilometre to the north-north-west, within an ecclesiastical enclosure associated with St Brendan of Clonfert, the sixth-century monastic founder whose influence spread widely across the west of Ireland. The name Maelbrendan, meaning "devotee of Brendan", suggests a direct connection to that cult, though whether the slab marks the grave of a monk, a lay patron, or some other figure is not recorded. Higgins, writing in 1987, catalogued it as a significant example of this type of commemorative stone. At some point after that documentation, the slab was moved from its original graveyard setting to the church in An Fhairche for safekeeping, which is where it can be found today.