Originally laid flat as recumbent grave markers, the slabs were at some point lifted upright and pressed into service as headstones, most likely during the busier burial activity of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The result is an accidental concealment: stones carved with intention and care are now partially buried in the earth, their lower sections and much of their decoration hidden from view.

The majority of the slabs are cut from schist, a locally available metamorphic rock with a naturally layered texture, but four of the twenty are granite. One of these granite examples sits roughly 26 metres south of the west gable of Aghowle Church, just inside the graveyard boundary. It measures 37 centimetres wide and stands 67 centimetres above ground in its current upright position, though how much lies beneath the surface is unknown. On its east face, a cross has been deeply incised into the stone, the shaft 10 centimetres wide and the upper arm 8 centimetres across. The cross appears originally to have stretched the full width of the slab, but one arm is cut short where the edge of the stone has been damaged at some point in its long life.

The clustering of these slabs in the southern part of the graveyard is itself a clue to the site's history. Because later burial activity concentrated there, that is where earlier stones were most likely to be encountered, reused, and inadvertently preserved. Visitors who look carefully at the graveyard's upright markers will find that some of the oldest things in the ground are not lying where they started.