It is a quietly incongruous thing to find at the entrance to a working farmhouse, and the inscription itself hints at a far more eventful earlier life. Partially legible despite damage to its upper left corner and both side edges, the text has been reconstructed to read: "Pray for the souls of Lord James Butler, Baron of Dunboyne, and of his wife, Lady Margaret O'Brien, daughter of the Earl of Thomond, who caused me to be made in honour of the crucified Christ. 1633."

The stone was not always where it now sits. Local tradition holds that it was originally erected on the summit of Mayfield Hill, also known locally as Anthony's Hill, by Lady Margaret O'Brien to mark the spot where her husband's funeral cortege rested overnight during its journey from Ballycahill to Fethard. The antiquarian Austin Cooper noted it there in 1781, at which point it still stood as a roughly sixty-centimetre square stone surmounted by a cross, the inscription raised from the surface rather than incised into it. At some point after that it fell into a nearby quarry and the cross, or at least its head, was broken off. A separate free-standing carved stone found in association with the plaque has been suggested as a possible remnant of that original cross base, though the connection remains speculative.