It measures roughly a metre and a half in length, just over a metre wide, and stands less than a metre tall. A second, near-identical structure sits a few metres away inside the graveyard itself. Small, squat, and easy to overlook, these are slab shrines, and their purpose was considerably more significant than their modest scale suggests.

Shrines of this construction are generally dated to the 7th century, predating by some five hundred years the Romanesque church of Templecronan that now stands beside them. The prevailing interpretation is that they were built to house the exhumed bodily remains of important ecclesiastics, a practice rooted in the early Irish church's veneration of founding saints and local holy figures. Exhumation and re-enshrinement of a revered person's bones was a way of formalising their cult, concentrating sacred authority in a physical place. The church at Templecronan, which dates to the 12th century, is itself a well-known early Christian site, but these two slab shrines appear to represent an even earlier phase of religious activity at the location, one that the later medieval building effectively grew up around rather than initiated. The fact that one shrine sits outside the graveyard wall entirely adds a small puzzle of its own, raising questions about how boundaries shifted, or were drawn in the first place, over the intervening centuries.