The 'Island of Conry' is no island in any conventional sense, but the boggy land surrounding it would have given the Early Christian community that settled here a quiet, semi-defended separateness. Lying flat on the ground about eight metres north-west of the twelfth-century ruins of Conry Church is a limestone cross-slab, a recumbent graveslab incised with a cross whose terminals expand into D-shaped or semi-circular forms, each decorated with interlace or spiral ornament. A double line frames the whole design. Much of the central surface has flaked away through erosion, and lichen covers what remains, so the carving now has to be read as much by patience as by sight.

Cross-slabs of this type, flat stones carved with a cross to mark a grave or a sacred boundary, are among the more quietly persistent objects of the Early Christian period in Ireland, produced roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. This one sits within a large oval-shaped enclosure, the kind of boundary that typically defined a monastic or ecclesiastical settlement, and a second cross-slab lies immediately south of the church, suggesting the site held some continued importance as a burial ground over a long period. The place-name offers its own small historical thread: the 1656 to 1659 Down Survey map records the townland as 'Conry and Cloghoule', and it is that second element, Cloghoule, which was eventually anglicised into the present Croughal. The same survey notes that in 1641 the lands belonged to one Henry Dalton, described in the document as an 'Irish papist', a designation that places him among the Catholic landowners whose holdings were being systematically recorded in the wake of the 1641 rebellion and in anticipation of the Cromwellian land settlements that followed.