It is the kind of object that slips through the gaps between museum display and active archaeology, neither fully preserved for public view nor lost, simply held in administrative limbo by the Office of Public Works.

The stone itself is a sandstone slab, naturally rounded at the top and tapering toward its base, which is now broken off. What survives measures at least 73 centimetres in length and 48 centimetres across. On its broad face, a Maltese cross has been carved within a circle roughly 33 centimetres in diameter, using a technique known as false relief, where the background is cut away to make the design appear raised without being fully three-dimensional. At the centre of the cross sits a small boss with a shallow depression pressed into it, a detail that suggests careful, deliberate craftsmanship rather than purely functional marking. Cross-slabs of this general type, flat stones incised or carved with a cross rather than shaped into a freestanding monument, are among the more common survivals of early Christian stonework in Ireland, though individually each carries its own local character.

Before it came to Kilkenny, the slab stood in the graveyard attached to Clone church in County Wexford. Clone was its home context, the ground in which its meaning was embedded, and the transfer to a depot, however carefully managed, inevitably strips something away. The stone is not damaged by being stored; it is simply waiting, and it is worth knowing that such objects exist in this condition, carefully numbered and catalogued but not yet returned to any kind of public life.