The cross-slab sits within an enclosure roughly twenty metres to the north-east of the island's early medieval church, and what makes it quietly peculiar is not its simplicity but its orientation. Scholars believe it is inverted, meaning the shaped top of the slab, which has gently sloping shoulders expanding into a large, irregularly formed protrusion, is currently buried in the ground, while what was originally the base points upward.

When the antiquarian F. J. Bigger documented the slab in 1896, it was standing upright on top of a leacht, a low commemorative cairn or burial mound of the kind commonly found at early Irish ecclesiastical sites, used for prayer and veneration. By the time researcher Higgins examined and described it in 1987, the slab had been moved about three metres to the south-south-east and set directly into the ground, losing its original context on the leacht. The irregular groove visible running across what is now the upper surface of the slab may have been decorative or functional in its original configuration. Beside the slab, to its west, sits a small spherical granite boulder that is thought to have once rested on the same leacht. Objects of this type are sometimes identified as cursing stones, smooth rounded rocks used in ritualised turning ceremonies intended to call down misfortune on an enemy, a practice documented at several sites across the west of Ireland. Whether this boulder played such a role here remains uncertain, but its probable displacement from the leacht links it to the wider pattern of gradual disturbance the site has experienced over the generations.