By 1965 it had already been broken into two fragments; sometime after that, it disappeared entirely. What survives is only the record of it, sketched and measured by scholars across more than half a century, a cross-slab, roughly 47cm tall and just 8cm thick, carved on one face with a cross set within a circle and beneath that a smaller cross with expanded terminals, the kind that flare slightly at each end, and the abbreviated Latin inscription DNE, a shortening of Domine, meaning Lord.

Kilmalkedar, known in Irish as Cill Maoilchéadair, sits at the foot of the western slopes of Reenconnell hill on the Dingle Peninsula, sheltered to the north and south by spurs of the ridge and looking out over Smerwick Harbour. The ecclesiastical complex there is one of the more significant Early Christian and medieval sites in Munster. The cross-slab itself was documented by Romilly Allen in 1892 and again by R. A. S. Macalister in 1949, who described the upper arm of the circle-cross as terminating in a B-shaped motif, an unusual decorative detail that sets it apart from more standard examples of the form. A cross-slab, to give the term its plainest meaning, is an upright or flat stone bearing an incised or relief cross, typically associated with early monastic sites across Ireland and used variously as grave markers or devotional objects. When a researcher from the National Museum of Ireland visited in 1965, the slab was still present, though already broken. Its current whereabouts are unknown.