It lay there, just ten metres south of the tiny oratory known as Teampall Bheanáin, its carved face pressed against rubble, until someone turned it over and realised what it was.

When the slab was first recorded in 1839, it was nearly intact: a Latin cross, the type with arms that flare outward into open, expanding terminals, still clearly legible across most of the stone's surface. A crack already ran through the upper terminal, but the cross as a whole remained coherent enough to sketch. That sketch, reproduced in O'Flanagan's 1927 publication, is now the only record of what the complete carving looked like, because at some point after 1839 the slab broke again. What survives today is a fragment measuring roughly 95 centimetres long and between 42 and 45 centimetres wide, bearing only the stem of the original incised cross and one expanded triangular terminal, from the centre of which a pointed projection extends downward. The incising is done in two lines rather than a single cut, a technique common in early medieval Irish stonework that gives the cross a slightly raised visual weight without actual relief carving. The slab's history in the scholarly literature is also somewhat tangled: Crawford, writing in 1913, listed it twice under separate catalogue entries, labelling it as two distinct slabs before the duplication was identified.

Teampall Bheanáin itself is one of the smallest early Christian churches in Ireland, perched on a limestone ridge above Cill Éinne, the main settlement at the eastern end of the island. The cross-slab's original function is not recorded, but slabs of this kind typically marked graves in early monastic enclosures, serving as simple but deliberate memorials within a sacred landscape that the Aran Islands accumulated across several centuries of early Christian activity.