The piece is genuinely tiny, roughly nine and a half centimetres tall and sixteen and a half centimetres wide, yet almost every centimetre of its visible face is taken up with incised text. What the original slab looked like, and how much more writing it once held, is simply not known. What remains is a fragment of something larger, broken off from a form that cannot now be reconstructed.

The stone was uncovered in 1944 during an excavation carried out by Duignan, and it is catalogued by scholars Okasha and Forsyth, writing in 2001, under the designation Toureen Peacaun 27. Inscribed slabs of this kind are a recurring feature of early medieval Irish ecclesiastical sites. They were typically carved to mark a grave or commemorate a named individual, often in Latin or ogham, the early Irish script that arranges characters as notches along a central stem line. In this case the text is described as fragmentary, meaning that even what survives is incomplete and only partially legible. The stone's incorporation into the church wall at some later point, a common fate for reused earlier stonework, is what preserved it, though also what limits the examination of it.