It is easy to overlook: barely half a metre of stone showing above the turf, weathered on one face almost to illegibility. But look closely at either side and you can make out a simply incised Latin cross, a form of early Christian grave marker or devotional stone that was set into the earth, often at monastic or anchoritic sites, to mark sacred ground or a place of burial.

The art historian Françoise Henry first documented this slab in 1951, in the Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, cataloguing it as Slab 8 among a group of monuments she was recording on Inishkea North. She noted that it had until recently been almost entirely buried in sand, with erosion on the slope gradually exposing it, and that its western face carried a Latin cross with a small circle at the base of the shaft. Henry described the eastern face as plain. More recent examination has found that both faces in fact bear incised crosses, raising the question of whether the second cross was always there but missed, or whether it had simply been obscured when Henry made her record. The slab is thin, only about seven centimetres deep, and roughly thirty centimetres wide. On the eastern face the cross sits centrally, its arms not quite reaching the stone's edges; on the western face, which backs into rising ground and is consequently less exposed, the cross is more worn, its horizontal arms extending the full width of the slab, its lower shaft disappearing into the sod. Whether a circle once sat at the base of that shaft, as Henry described, can no longer be confirmed.

The slab sits just above the point where the mound slope falls away more sharply, with the remains of a house visible a short distance to the north. The island was home to a monastic community in the early medieval period, and several cross-slabs are known from the site, each offering a small, worn trace of that occupation. This one, designated a National Monument in state ownership, is modest in scale but precise in its detail, and the slight discrepancy between Henry's account and what can be observed today gives it an added layer of quiet interest for anyone paying attention.