It sits on the chancel floor alongside eight late medieval graveslabs arranged in two neat rows of four, as though someone simply forgot to close it, or perhaps never got the chance. The coffin itself is substantial, two metres long externally, with walls between ten and twenty centimetres thick, and an internal space of 1.6 metres by 0.63 metres, large enough for a person of reasonable stature. Two of the graveslabs lying immediately to its north and south may once have served as its cover, though whether either actually did so remains uncertain.

The church whose floor it occupies, a nave and chancel structure with a barrel-vaulted tower added onto the eastern end of the chancel, was already an established ecclesiastical site by the early fourteenth century. It appears in the ecclesiastical taxation of the Diocese of Cashel in 1302, placing it within a documented network of church properties across Munster at a time when such surveys were used to assess contributions to papal and royal funds. The site sits on an east-facing slope in gently rolling countryside, with a ringwork, an earthen enclosure of the kind typically associated with early Norman settlement, to the west, and a tower house to the east, suggesting that this small patch of Tipperary was once a good deal busier than it appears today. The sarcophagus, positioned in the southern row of graveslabs near the east gable of the chancel, would have been a conspicuous feature even when the building was roofed and in use, raising the question of whose burial it was intended to mark, and why the lid, if it ever existed as a proper stone cover, has not survived or cannot be conclusively identified.