That combination, a piece of early Christian-style carving folded quietly into an active burial ground, is the kind of detail that tends to go unnoticed unless someone looks carefully.

In 2011, archaeologists Ann Frykler and Robert Hanbidge of Headland Archaeology Ltd. conducted a graveyard survey and recorded the stone among their findings. They identified it as a thin slab of probable old red sandstone, a sedimentary rock common across parts of Munster, with a cross that had been picked out rather than incised with a blade, meaning the design was formed by removing material in a dotted or pecked pattern across the surface. The stone was catalogued as Miscellaneous No. 14 and noted as also functioning as a gravemarker for Grave No. 402. Old red sandstone cross-slabs of this general type are associated with early medieval Christian practice in Ireland, though the precise age of this particular example was not established in the survey.