Cross-slabs are among the simpler markers of early Christian burial practice in Ireland, flat stones incised with a cross rather than sculpted in the round, and they turn up across graveyards that have been in use since the early medieval period. What makes this one quietly notable is the circumstances of its recovery.

The slab was excavated in 1991 and subsequently set upright against the east gable wall of the church, where it has remained since. A graveyard survey conducted by Laurence Dunne in 2010 recorded it as cross-slab no. 535, a single stone in a site that clearly merited systematic documentation. The name An Gorta Dubha, meaning roughly "the black famine" in Irish, gives the place a sombre register of its own, though the church and its burial ground predate any association that name might carry by many centuries.