It is only 63 centimetres tall and barely a finger's width in depth, yet it belongs to an early medieval tradition of cross-inscribed pillars, simple upright stones carved with Christian symbols that marked sacred ground, burial areas, or places of prayer long before more elaborate church architecture took hold.

The pillar surfaced during Office of Public Works works at the site in the 1950s, at which point it was set upright to the east of what is considered the earliest church at Annaghdown. It was not particularly stable even then, and another slab, now lost, had been lying beneath it. By the early 1980s it had been moved inside a later church roughly 55 metres to the south-east, and by October 2014 it had migrated again, this time to stand against the external east gable of that same building. In April 2015 it was taken temporarily to an OPW depot for safekeeping, making it, at that point, one of the more widely travelled early medieval stones in Connacht. The carving itself rewards close attention. The front face bears a straightforward one-line Latin cross in the upper third of the stone. The reverse is more considered: a cross with two arms, and two additional vertical lines placed midway between those arms, creating a denser, more layered composition that occupies the upper half of the slab.