The original cross-slab that once marked the foot of a grave in the south-eastern corner of the burial ground has been removed to an OPW depot in Athenry for safekeeping, leaving a facsimile in its place. That quiet substitution hints at how genuinely old and fragile the original is, a carved stone slab just under a metre tall, shaped from garnet mica-schist, the kind of metamorphic rock streaked with glittering minerals that occurs naturally along this stretch of the Connacht coast.

The slab served as the footstone of a grave, designated Grave 1, whose skeletal remains have been dated to somewhere between the early eleventh and the late twelfth century. The stone itself was probably older still, reused for the burial rather than carved specifically for it. Its shape is already unusual: it tapers toward a rounded base and then widens in the upper section, the sides curving outward at what carvers would call the armpits, so that the slab itself becomes a minimal cross-form without any separate cross being needed. Both faces carry carved decoration. The east face has irregular notches outlining a Latin cross head, with bosses in the upper armpits and a central roundel enclosing an equal-armed cross whose three upper limbs each end in a fork. The west face carries a similar linear cross set on a boss. Fisher, writing in 2014, noted that the decoration on the east face closely resembles that on the headstone of the adjacent Grave 2, suggesting a shared workshop tradition or at least a common visual vocabulary among whoever was carving on this remote Atlantic island.

High Island, known in Irish as Ard Oileán, lies off the Connemara coast and is accessible only by boat in suitable weather. The graveyard sits within an early medieval monastic enclosure, and the cross-slab fits into that layered context of reuse and long habitation. Anyone who makes the crossing and walks the site will find the replica where the original stood, which is, in its own way, honest about the compromises involved in preserving things that were never meant to last.