It is not a grand monument. It measures roughly 1.56 metres tall and just over half a metre wide, and its decoration is restrained almost to the point of severity: a plain Latin cross rising from a trapezoidal base with slightly hollowed sides, a shallow groove tracing the outline of the base, and a subtle relief at the top of the base where the stone slopes gently back down to the level of the background. The carving asks you to look carefully rather than announcing itself.

Inishcaltra, an island in Lough Derg on the Shannon, was one of the more significant early Christian monastic sites in the west of Ireland, associated with Saint Caimin and drawing pilgrims for centuries. The Saints' Graveyard is among several ecclesiastical enclosures on the island, and this cross-slab is one of a number of carved stones that accumulated there over a long period of use. The scholar R. A. S. Macalister catalogued this particular slab in 1916 to 1917, identifying it as twelfth-century in type, which places it within a period when Irish monasteries were undergoing significant reform and Romanesque influence was filtering into stone carving across the island. A cross-slab, broadly speaking, is a flat stone incised or carved with a cross, used as a grave marker or devotional object, and they vary enormously in ambition; this one is among the plainer examples, its interest lying in the precise geometry of that grooved base rather than in elaborate ornament.

Inishcaltra is accessible by boat from Mountshannon on the Clare shore. The Saints' Graveyard lies within the island's complex of ruins, and the slab stands close to the western wall of the enclosure, near the entrance. The island rewards slow movement; the density of carved stones, grave markers, and architectural fragments means that what seems at first like open grass turns out, on closer inspection, to be full of things worth crouching down to examine.