These stones were not made to stand. Originally laid flat as recumbent grave markers, a practice common in early medieval Ireland, they were repurposed at some point as vertical headstones, most likely during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when the southern section of the graveyard was in active use. The conversion was practical rather than reverent, and it has consequences: with the lower portions driven into the ground, much of each slab's carved surface is now buried and invisible. What survives above ground is, in many cases, only a fragment of the original design.

The slabs are predominantly schist, a fine-grained metamorphic stone well suited to incised carving, though four of the twenty, numbered 2, 11, 15, and 16, are of granite. Cross-slab 18, documented by Chris Corlett, sits in the southeast corner of the graveyard and gives a good sense of what the group offers. It is a modest stone, 40 centimetres wide and 32 centimetres high above the surface, with a thickness of 12 centimetres. On its west face, an outline cross has been cut with a narrow, shallow incised line; the upper transom and arms are 6 centimetres wide and cusped at the intersection, meaning the angles where the arms meet are slightly hollowed or pointed inward, a decorative detail characteristic of early Christian stonework in Ireland. The shaft of the cross drops below the current ground level and cannot be seen.

For anyone visiting Aghowle, the slabs are worth approaching slowly and in good raking light, which brings out shallow incision far better than direct overhead sun. Because so many of the stones are partially buried, the visible carvings can be easy to overlook among the more legible later headstones that surround them. The concentration in the southern part of the graveyard is where most of the cross-slabs are to be found.