The cross-slab from Beggerin Island is a narrow schist slab, roughly 90 centimetres tall and barely 6 centimetres thick, and what survives of it is enough to suggest something quite out of the ordinary. One face bears a cross in relief set on a hollow triangular base, with incised lines defining the ring around the cross-head; the other face may once have carried a Maltese cross within a circle at the crux. Below these crosses, in two separate panels, are figurative carvings: a group of three figures, now badly worn, and beneath them a single horseman rendered with enough clarity to still be legible.

Beggerin Island, in the estuary of the River Slaney near Wexford town, was the site of an early medieval church, and the stone originally belonged to that ecclesiastical context. Cross-slabs are a common enough form in early Christian Ireland, essentially upright stones bearing a carved cross used to mark graves or sacred boundaries, but this one carries details that push it outside the usual local tradition. Peter Harbison, writing in 1988, proposed a ninth-century date for the slab and noted what he read as a Cornish influence in its style. That attribution is not merely academic curiosity: it places the stone within a network of contacts across the Irish Sea at a time when monastic communities maintained connections that cut across what we now think of as national boundaries. Whether the stone was carved by someone who had travelled, or reflects a tradition absorbed through contact with western Britain, the horseman panel in particular has no close parallel in the immediate Wexford region.

The slab is now held at the Ferns Visitor Centre, located within Ferns Castle in Co. Wexford. Ferns itself was a significant early medieval site, which makes it a reasonably appropriate home for the stone, even if Beggerin was its origin. The circular head of the slab is damaged, and the upper figurative panel has suffered considerable wear, so some patience is required when looking at it closely; the horseman in the lower panel remains the most legible of its carved details.