The carving on one face is clear enough; on the other it has faded to something close to a ghost in the stone. That this object survives at all is partly a matter of luck. It is now kept inside the main oratory on Illauntannig, the largest of the Magharee Islands off the northern tip of the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry, moved there for safe-keeping at some point after its discovery, its original position within the settlement no longer known.

Illauntannig sits in the channel between Brandon Bay and Tralee Bay, and the Early Christian monastic settlement it holds is one of the more complete of its kind on the western seaboard. The whole complex is enclosed by a cashel wall, a dry-stone enclosure typical of early Irish monasticism, and within it stand two small oratories, three bee-hive huts (corbelled stone cells used by monks), a souterrain (an underground passage or storage chamber), three leachts, a burial ground, and a stone cross. The cross-slab in question is one of three found within the enclosure, accompanied by a bullaun stone, a fragment of a hand-bell, and pieces of five quern-stones. A bullaun stone is a boulder with one or more circular hollows worn or carved into its surface, associated across Ireland with early ecclesiastical sites and sometimes with ritual use. A second bullaun lies roughly a hundred metres to the south, at the very edge of the sea. Across the water on the nearby headland of Reennafardarrig, a hut-site, old field walls, and a reputed cross-inscribed boulder may point to the same monastic community extending its presence onto the mainland.

The cross-slabs are housed inside the oratory, so a visitor standing in the open enclosure will not see them without stepping inside. The island itself is accessible only by boat from the peninsula, and the crossing and conditions depend on the season and the weather along this exposed stretch of Atlantic coast.