Among the graveyard stones at Ardmore, one small slab tends to go unnoticed beside the more celebrated monuments that surround it. Measuring just half a metre in height, it is rough-edged and undressed, with none of the polish of a commissioned memorial. What marks it out is what has been cut directly into its face: a deeply incised cross whose expanded terminals, the splayed or widened ends of each arm, spread to fill almost the entire surface of the stone. Three of the four arms are roughly equal in size, though the lateral ones have worn considerably over time, the right side especially so. The lower terminal is better preserved, and noticeably smaller than the arms above it, which gives the cross a slightly top-heavy, deliberate geometry.

The slab sits in the graveyard at Ardocheasty, on the Co. Waterford coast, within a complex of early Christian remains that includes St Declan's Oratory, one of the oldest church buildings in Ireland, a late twelfth-century cathedral, and a round tower. Round towers, the tall tapering stone structures associated with early Irish monasteries, were typically used as bell towers and places of refuge, and their presence usually signals a site of considerable ecclesiastical importance. St Declan himself was a bishop associated with the Déisi people of Waterford, said to have brought Christianity to the region before the arrival of St Patrick, which places the origins of this settlement firmly in the early medieval period. The cross-slab, with its incised rather than relief-carved decoration, is consistent with a tradition of early Christian stone-cutting found across Ireland, where plain slabs were marked with a cross to sanctify burial ground or commemorate the faithful.