The original cross-slab that once marked the foot of Grave 5, the earliest known burial on this remote Galway island, now sits in an OPW depot in Athenry. It is a small stone, only 62 centimetres tall and carved from garnet mica-schist, a metamorphic rock flecked with dark minerals, yet its surface repays close attention. On its eastern face alone, a relief cross spreads outward with roughly D-shaped terminals, a raised central roundel, and incised grooves that, taken together, hint at a human figure folded into the geometry. The upper and lower terminals carry incised grooves, the side terminals horizontal bars, and the overall arrangement is interpreted as suggestive of an anthropomorphic form, a quietly ambiguous piece of early medieval carving that sits somewhere between abstract ornament and figured devotion.

The slab was found in situ as the footstone of Grave 5, though it was probably reused from an earlier context, meaning the stone's carving life likely predates even the burial it came to mark. That burial has been dated to the late 9th to the late 10th century, placing it within the monastic period of activity on High Island, a site long associated with early Christian settlement off the Connemara coast. The decoration itself is layered: a notched roundel forming an equal-armed cross with expanded arms, and a linear cross superimposed on top, so that at least two distinct visual schemes are compressed into the one small face. Fisher's 2014 study documented it as number 11 in the site's carved stone sequence, while White Marshall and Rourke had earlier catalogued it in their survey of Irish early medieval cross-slabs.