Yet this particular cross-slab, now built into the enclosure wall surrounding the early medieval church on High Island off the Connemara coast, carries with it a small but telling history of displacement and reuse. It is incomplete, its top and right arms lost, but what remains shows an incised outline Latin cross with deep, roughly circular hollows cut at the points where the arms meet the shaft, a feature that gives the carving an unusual tactile quality even in its weathered state.

When the antiquarian W. F. Wakeman drew the west façade of the High Island church in 1839, this slab appeared in the background, apparently free-standing. That single image fixes a moment in the object's biography. By the time scholars were examining it in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it had been moved and set into the enclosure wall, most likely during a rebuilding of that structure. A cross-slab is essentially a flat stone, usually of early Christian date, carved with a cross rather than shaped into a full three-dimensional cross, and this one is made from garnet mica-schist threaded with quartz veins, a rock type that gives it a faintly glittering surface. The lateral arms of the cross originally reached to the very edges of the stone, which would have given the design a bold, unframed quality before breakage reduced it to its current form.