The slab is fractured into at least three pieces, and the fragments do not fit together in any way that makes the text legible. The script is half-uncial, a rounded, carefully formed style of lettering used by early medieval monks across Ireland and Britain, and it points unmistakably to the island's origins as a place of Early Christian religious life. What the inscription actually says remains, for now, an open question.

Illauntannig is the largest of the Magharee Islands, a scatter of small islands lying off the northern tip of the peninsula that divides Brandon Bay from Tralee Bay. The Early Christian settlement there is enclosed within a cashel wall, a dry-stone enclosure typical of early Irish monastic sites, and within it stand two small oratories, three beehive huts, a souterrain (an underground stone-lined passage, likely used for storage or refuge), three leachts (low rectangular stone cairns associated with prayer or commemoration), and a burial ground. Alongside the inscribed cross-slab, excavations and surveys have turned up two further cross-slabs, a bullaun stone (a rock with a bowl-shaped hollow, often associated with ritual use), a hand-bell, and fragments of five quern-stones used for grinding grain. A second bullaun stone sits roughly a hundred metres to the south, close to the edge of the sea. Field walls and a possible cross-inscribed boulder on the nearby promontory of Reennafardarrig may also belong to the same monastic community.

The three cross-slabs, including the broken inscribed one, have been moved into the main oratory for safe-keeping, and their original positions within the settlement are no longer known. The oratory now functions as a kind of unplanned archive, sheltering objects whose precise context has been lost but whose presence on this windswept Atlantic island still speaks clearly enough to the intensity of early medieval religious life on the western edge of Ireland.