The stone was not placed upright in a graveyard or set into a church wall, as one might expect of early Christian carved work; it served, it seems, as a lintel, bearing the weight of a domestic entrance above it.

The slab came to light during excavations carried out by the scholar Françoise Henry in 1945. She found it lying just outside the entrance passage of a house built on top of Bailey Mór mound, a raised earthwork feature on the island. Henry proposed that the slab had originally functioned as the lintel of the doorway itself. The carving engraved upon it is a cross whose long arms end in Y-shaped terminals, a bifurcating form found in early medieval Irish stonework, and the design fills roughly half the length of the slab. The choice to incorporate a decorated cross-slab into the fabric of a building rather than treat it as a freestanding monument raises questions that remain open. Was it repurposed from an earlier religious context, or was it carved specifically for this domestic and perhaps devotional threshold use? Henry's publication of the find, including a photograph, brought it into the wider record of early Christian carved stones in Ireland, though the island setting means the slab itself has received relatively little attention since.