It is the kind of object that gets bypassed in favour of grander monuments, but there is something quietly arresting about a slab that has survived in this fractured state, still carrying the ghost of its original intention.

The slab now rests inside St Finan's Church on Church Island, a site associated with the early Christian saint Fionán. It measures 1.55 metres at its longest and averages around 55 centimetres in width, though it is only about 3 centimetres thick, which perhaps explains why it cracked. What it bears is an outline Latin cross, a cross-slab being a flat stone incised with a cross rather than carved in full relief, and this one has an unusual double-ringed treatment: two concentric grooves run around the cross, with the outer groove framing the terminals, the points where the arms end. The shaft of the cross does not taper evenly but narrows irregularly down to a point, giving it a slightly hand-hewn, unsystematic quality that feels appropriate for early medieval stonework of this kind. The spalling on the upper surface, where flakes of stone have broken away over time, has obscured some of the detail, but the basic design remains visible.