It is easy to walk past without a second glance, yet the stone is almost certainly a survivor from an earlier building entirely, relocated and reused, carrying with it the faint trace of someone who once wanted to mark a place or a moment as their own.

The likeliest origin for the stone is a modest structure recorded in the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, a mid-seventeenth-century document compiled to establish land ownership across Ireland in the aftermath of the Confederate Wars. The surveyors noted, with a certain bluntness, that on the lands of Coollonen there stood 'a small stone house in a decayeing condition and noe other improvemt'. By that point the house was already falling apart, which makes the survival of any piece of it all the more unlikely. A record from 1640 names John Butler of Lissnodobrid, described as a gentleman and an Irish Papist, the latter a legal designation used to track Catholic landowners under the administration of the period, as the proprietor of Coollonen. Whether the initials 'ICMO' on the stone connect to Butler or to an earlier occupant is not certain, but the date of 1620 places the carving squarely within his period of ownership or just before it.