The cross it once displayed, a ringed cross rendered in three incised lines, has faded so thoroughly that only the western half of the head and two circular terminals at the base are still barely traceable. Most visitors completing the devotional circuit in the grounds of St Patrick's Redemptorist Monastery at Esker, near Athenry, would have little reason to pause at this particular station on account of the stonework rather than the religious observance. Yet the slab almost certainly does not belong here at all.

The stone is reputed to have been brought to Esker from Clonmacnoise, Co. Offaly, around the turn of the twentieth century. Clonmacnoise, founded in the sixth century on a bend of the River Shannon, was one of the most prolific producers of early medieval carved stonework in Ireland, and its collections of cross-slabs, flat stones incised or carved with crosses and sometimes inscriptions, represent some of the finest surviving examples of the form. A cross-slab of this type, modest in size at roughly 55 centimetres tall and 35 centimetres wide, would not have been unusual among the hundreds of fragments associated with the site. How it came to be relocated to a Redemptorist monastery in Connacht is unrecorded, though the timing, around 1900, places the transfer within a period when early Christian stone carvings were sometimes moved, gifted, or collected with considerably less scrutiny than would be applied today. The slab is considered possibly of early medieval date, which would place its origins within the same broad era as Clonmacnoise's greatest activity.

The monastery grounds at Esker are accessible to visitors, and the woodland Stations of the Cross walk provides a quiet setting in which to look for the slab. It is incorporated into the surround of the twelfth station specifically, and close inspection of the stonework rather than the station's main imagery is needed to pick out what remains of the carved cross.