That ambiguity, frozen in stone, is what makes this fragment from High Island quietly compelling. Because the shaft has been truncated by the break, it remains uncertain whether the original design was a Latin cross, with its characteristic long downward arm, or a Greek cross, with arms of roughly equal length. The question cannot be answered without the missing piece.

The slab came to light during excavations of the floor of a structure known as Cell B, one of the clochans associated with the early monastic settlement on High Island off the Connemara coast. A clochan is a small dry-stone corbelled hut of the kind built by early Irish monks, often clustered near a church. Cell B sits to the east of the island's church, and it was beneath its floor that this fragment was found, a single decorated face pressed into the ground, its context suggesting long burial rather than display. Fisher documented it in 2014, recording its dimensions and the garnet mica-schist from which it was cut, a metamorphic rock with a distinctive crystalline texture common to this part of the west of Ireland. The slab is now held at the Office of Public Works depot in Athenry, County Galway, removed from the island for safekeeping rather than left on the exposed Atlantic site where it was discovered.