One is deliberate and devotional; the other is purely practical, and considerably less reverent. The slab bears a plain Latin cross, incised in double lines with a base formed by oblique lines descending from the lower corners of the stem, a composition that the antiquarian R.A.S. Macalister, writing in 1916 to 1917, identified as twelfth-century in type. But running across the surface are deep, straight grooves that have nothing to do with Christian iconography. At some point, someone used the slab to sharpen tools.

The stone itself is substantial, measuring roughly 1.57 metres tall, 0.54 metres wide, and 0.11 metres thick. Its location inside St. Caimin's church, set against the nave's south wall and positioned about 5.88 metres from the eastern end, suggests it was eventually afforded some degree of protection or at least placement within a meaningful architectural context. Inishcaltra, also known as Holy Island, was an important early Christian site, and St. Caimin's church is one of several ecclesiastical structures clustered on the island. The cross-slab's likely medieval origin places it within a long tradition of inscribed memorial or boundary markers at such sites, though nothing in what survives tells us who, if anyone, it commemorated. What the tool-sharpening grooves do suggest is that, at some stage in the island's history, the slab was either lying flat and accessible, or simply treated as a convenient hard surface rather than a sacred object, a small, telling detail about how attitudes toward old stonework could shift over centuries.