Originally laid flat as recumbent grave markers, a common practice in early Christian Ireland, most have been pulled upright and pressed into service as ordinary headstones, standing among the 18th and 19th century burial markers in the southern part of the graveyard. The consequence of this reuse is both practical and a little melancholy: because the slabs are set into the ground, a significant portion of each one is buried, and the carvings they carry are partly or entirely concealed beneath the soil line.

The majority of the slabs are cut from schist, a fine-grained metamorphic stone common in the Wicklow uplands, though four of the twenty, slabs 2, 11, 15, and 16, are granite. One of the more closely documented examples, cross-slab 13, stands south of the church and gives a sense of the group's character. It measures 45 centimetres wide and presently stands 45 centimetres high, with a plain incised cross on its east face spanning 24 centimetres. The cross is formed by a single well-cut groove, roughly a centimetre wide and between five and eight millimetres deep, with a shaft eight centimetres across and an upper arm nine centimetres wide. There is nothing elaborate about it; the simplicity is the point. Early Christian carvers in Ireland often favoured this kind of spare, geometric incision, allowing the form of the cross to carry its meaning without ornament.

Visitors walking the southern section of the graveyard will find the slabs distributed among later headstones, easy to overlook at first glance but distinctive once the eye adjusts to their age and texture. Because much of the carved surface on each slab sits below ground level, what is visible tends to be the upper portion only, making close and patient observation worthwhile.