What marks it out are the opposed pairs of notches cut into its sides, a simple but deliberate form of marking that identifies it as one of the early Christian stone crosses associated with the monastic remains on Church Island in Co. Kerry. It was not found in situ but recovered from disturbed ground just outside the southern wall of a stone oratory, the small single-roomed church type common to early Irish island monasteries, built without mortar and relying on the careful fitting of stone against stone.

The cross forms part of a broader collection of early medieval material on Church Island, documented by archaeologists Aidan O'Sullivan and Jerry Sheehan in their 1996 survey of the Iveragh Peninsula published by Cork University Press. The island sits within a landscape that was, in the early medieval period, dotted with monastic enclosures, hermitages, and small oratories, many of them on islands or coastal promontories where the physical separation from the mainland carried spiritual as much as practical meaning. The notched slab is a modest object by any measure, 78 centimetres long and 19 centimetres wide, but its recovery from disturbed ground hints at how much of such a site has been shifted, reused, or simply lost over the centuries.