That it survived at all is something of an accident of archaeology; it had been incorporated into the paved floor of a clochan, the type of dry-stone beehive hut used by early Christian monks as individual sleeping or prayer cells, on High Island, a site that preserves one of the more complete early monastic enclosures in the west of Ireland.

The slab, recorded by Fisher in 2014, is made from garnet mica-schist and is roughly triangular in form, measuring 0.56 metres high, 0.31 metres wide, and 0.1 metres thick. On one face, carved above the base, is an expansional Latin cross, a type in which the arms flare outward toward their ends, framed within a band that has an ovoid centre and D-shaped terminals at each arm. It was found in Cell A, the clochan immediately to the north of the island's church, and is one of a pair of cross-slabs recovered from the same paved floor. Cross-slabs of this kind are among the most common carved monuments associated with early Irish monasticism; they marked graves, defined sacred boundaries, or served as focal points for prayer, though the precise function of any individual example is rarely certain. That these two were set face-down into a floor suggests they may have been reused from an earlier context within the monastic complex, their original purpose long forgotten by the community that walked over them.

The slab is no longer on High Island. It is currently held at the Office of Public Works depot in Athenry, Co. Galway, removed for safekeeping from a site that, given its exposure to Atlantic weather and the difficulty of access, presents obvious challenges for conservation.