Originally laid flat as recumbent grave markers, most have been lifted upright and pressed into service as burial headstones, probably during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when the southern part of the graveyard was most actively used. The consequence is that a good portion of each slab sits below ground level, and the carved decoration that once faced the sky is now partly buried or obscured. It is a quiet kind of repurposing, practical and unsentimental, that has preserved the stones while simultaneously hiding much of what makes them interesting.

The slabs are mostly of schist, a locally common metamorphic rock that splits into workable sheets, though four of the twenty, numbers 2, 11, 15, and 16, are of granite. One of the more legible examples, known as Cross Slab 10, stands roughly ten metres south of the east gable of Aghowle Church. It measures fifty centimetres wide and just nine centimetres thick, and currently stands fifty-five centimetres above the ground. On its east face, a cross has been cut using a shallow incised line about a centimetre wide, forming an outlined cross with cusped arms, meaning the ends of the arms curve inward slightly into a concave point. The arms span thirty-eight centimetres across, with a shaft eight centimetres wide. The carving is restrained and precise, the work of someone following a well-established tradition of early Christian stone decoration found across Ireland.

Visitors to Aghowle should look carefully at the upright stones in the southern section of the graveyard, many of which appear, at first glance, to be ordinary post-medieval headstones. The cross-slabs tend to be thinner and simpler than later carved markers, and the incised crosses are easy to miss if the light is flat. Early morning or low afternoon sun, which rakes across the surface of the stone, makes the shallow lines considerably easier to read.