Somebody drilled a small hole through its lower left side, roughly five centimetres across, and used it as a spud stone, the kind of fixed stone with a hole through which a gate or door hinge pin would pivot. The wear around that hole is still visible, and it tells you something about how the past gets absorbed into the everyday, quite literally repurposed, until the original meaning is almost entirely worn away.

What survives of the slab is a fragment. The head is gone, the base is gone, and what remains measures less than a metre in length. It tapers slightly, wider at the top than the bottom, and is cut from sandstone to a depth of about twelve centimetres. Despite the breakage and the secondary use, the decoration on its face is still legible. Incised lines define a cross-shaft, the kind of carved groove work associated with early medieval and later medieval Irish funerary slabs, and from that shaft scroll forms branch outward. Running along the outer face from top to bottom are zig-zag lines, also called incised chevrons, a repeating angular pattern that gives the slab a lively, almost textile quality, unusual for what is essentially a grave marker. The combination of the cross-shaft with scrolls and chevrons marks this out as more elaborate than the plainer slab memorials found across the Irish countryside.

The slab now rests against the western wall of Newtown Lennon graveyard, about 2.4 metres south of the north wall. It sits quietly among the other stones, not mounted or displayed in any formal way, just leaning there. The worn hole on its side is easy to overlook until you know what you are looking at, and then it becomes the detail that makes the whole object strange.