The shaft is outlined, the end left open, the form defined by a broad pocked line pressed into the stone rather than cut cleanly through it. At just thirty centimetres tall and fifteen wide, it is easy to overlook, and its reverse face remains inaccessible, pressed against the ledge on which it rests.

St. Berrihert's Kyle is an early medieval ecclesiastical enclosure, a kyle being an Irish term for a small wood or secluded place associated with a saint. The site holds a remarkable collection of early Christian cross-slabs, the kind of incised or relief-carved stones that were produced in Ireland roughly between the sixth and twelfth centuries, often marking graves or serving devotional purposes. This particular piece, catalogued as slab 52 by the scholar Ó hÉailidhe in 1967, sits within an oval stone enclosure that was constructed by the Office of Public Works in 1946 to house and protect the collection. That enclosure is stepped internally, creating a series of ledges on which individual slabs are displayed, and it is on one of these northeast-facing ledges that slab 52 has sat for the better part of eighty years. The decision to gather and shelter the stones was well-intentioned, though it means the reverse of several slabs, including this one, cannot now be examined without disturbing the arrangement.