The motifs cut into it belong to the passage tomb tradition, a tradition most familiar from Newgrange in the Boyne Valley, and they find close parallels at Bryn Celli Ddu in Wales and Gavrinis in Brittany. What makes the Cape Clear stone quietly remarkable is not just the quality of the carving but the wandering history that almost caused it to be lost entirely.

The stone came to light around 1880 when two men, a Mr Ó Síocháin and a Mr Ó Ríogáin, were clearing a field in the townland of Croha West on Cape Clear Island, land then belonging to a Mr Shipsey. It was removed to Sherkin Island, where it sat unnoticed until 1945, then passed eventually to University College Cork and is now held in Cork Public Museum. When archaeologist M. J. O'Kelly examined it in 1949, he described the decoration in careful detail: a horizontal chevron across the top, three clockwise spirals filling the centre, groups of V-shaped marks descending the left edge, and a double zig-zag on the right that dissolves at its lower end into a crude serpentiform. The ornament was executed in a pock technique, meaning the design was pecked out with a pointed tool, and it is deeply scored and clearly legible despite a large flake having broken away from the lower third of the stone, taking part of the design with it. The most likely source for the slab is a passage tomb, a megalithic burial monument typically consisting of a stone-lined passage leading to a chamber beneath a cairn, identified in 1984 on the summit of the highest hill in the townland of Killickaforavane, some half a mile to the north-east of where the stone was found. That survey found a sub-circular cairn roughly 16 metres across, with orthostats, the large upright stones that form the walls of such monuments, still in place along a passage and around a central chamber. Research by Éamon Lankford of the Clear Island Museum Society further established that pottery fragments were found at the spot where the decorated stone was discovered, adding another thread of prehistoric activity to an already layered site.