It is the kind of object that rewards a second look. At first glance it reads as a simple early Christian cross, but the longer you study it, the more questions it raises about what is original, what is added, and what the letters scratched into its surface were meant to say.

The slab bears a Latin cross with wedge-shaped terminals, a form associated with early medieval Irish stoneworking, in which the arms of the cross flare outward at their ends rather than finishing square or rounded. At some point, the letters ST and G were incised into the stone, an abbreviation understood to refer to Saint Gobnet, a female saint venerated in early Irish Christianity. According to Dr J. Waddell, these letters are a later addition rather than part of the original carving, meaning someone returned to the stone after its initial creation and left their own mark on it. Whether this was an act of devotion, a record of local tradition, or simply a way of anchoring an anonymous object to a known figure in the saints' calendar is not recorded. The slab itself has been moved from its original position and placed on top of the church altar, so its relationship to the surrounding structure is one of arrangement rather than continuity.

The church it sits in, on Inis Oírr, the easternmost of the Aran Islands off the Galway coast, is a small and fairly spare ruin. The combination of the repurposed medieval slab, the later inscribed initials, and the altered setting gives the object a quietly layered quality, each intervention leaving a trace without quite explaining itself.