What makes it notable is not its size or obvious ornament but what it may be: a cross-slab, the kind of simply worked stone that served as a memorial across early medieval Ireland. This one has a slight shouldering to its shape and, if you look carefully, bears a very faint incised cross, the lines worn to near-invisibility but still there.

Inishshark, an island off the Connemara coast, was evacuated in 1960 when its last remaining inhabitants were resettled on the mainland, leaving behind a landscape of abandoned cottages, field systems, and older remains that predate the modern settlement by centuries. The burial ground sits on a headland at the island's south-eastern end, and it is within the south-western quadrant of that ground that this stone stands. A cross-slab, in the broad sense, is a piece of stone bearing an incised or carved cross, often without the full three-dimensional form of a free-standing cross; examples range from the very early medieval period through to the post-Norman centuries, and this one is tentatively assigned a medieval date. The shouldering, a slight narrowing near the top of the stone that gives it something of a shaped outline, is a feature sometimes associated with earlier examples of the type, though the evidence here is not conclusive.