The text, as scholars have reconstructed it, reads something close to SANCTUS AE, though the beginning and end are lost. The letters CS on the stone are an abbreviation of the Latin sanctus, the standard shorthand used in early medieval inscriptions across Ireland, the same form appearing in the genitive on a comparable slab from Kilbrecan on Aran Mór. What is unusual here is not simply the inscription itself but the wandering history of the object, which has moved between institutions, depots, and display cases over the past sixty years while its original context slowly recedes.

The slab originated at Monaincha, a site of early Christian significance in County Tipperary, where it was found in fragments at various points around the early church. At some point before 1964, the three pieces were mounted on the wall of the Romanesque church there, a church whose architecture dates to the twelfth century and which survives on what was once an island surrounded by bogland. The fragments were first formally recorded in 1964, when they were held at the National Museum of Ireland. In October of that year, the Office of Public Works removed them from the museum, and by 1983 they had been transferred to a depot in Kilkenny. The slab is now displayed at the Black Mills Interpretative Centre in Roscrea, having travelled a considerable distance from the marshy island church where someone originally carved a saint's name into the stone.