That inversion is not damage or accident; the two-line text reading "ORDOMAEL PATRAIC" was deliberately incised upside down relative to the cross below it, a detail that has puzzled scholars and gives the piece a quietly unsettling quality even in description.

The slab originally occupied the south wall of St. Caimin's church on Inis Cealtra, the island on Lough Derg known in English as Holy Island, a site associated with early Christian monasticism in County Clare. A cross-slab, in the most basic sense, is a flat stone dressed and carved with a cross, often also bearing an inscription or decorative motif, and used as a grave marker or commemorative monument. This particular example measures roughly 96 centimetres tall, 38 centimetres wide, and 6 centimetres thick, irregular in outline but well preserved. The face carries a deeply incised outline Latin cross, its angles hollowed out, set on a trapezoidal base. R. A. S. Macalister, writing in 1916 to 1917, catalogued the piece and dated it to the twelfth century, noting the overlined "OR" at the opening of the inscription, a scribal convention indicating abbreviation. The text itself, "ORDOMAEL PATRAIC", likely records a personal name alongside that of the apostle Patrick, though the exact reading and its significance continue to attract scholarly attention, including that of Okasha and Forsyth in their 2001 study of the inscribed stones of early medieval Ireland.

The slab's physical journey is its own small story. It was exhibited in Mountshannon in August 1982, brought briefly into public view before being transferred to an Office of Public Works depot in Athenry, County Galway, where it has since been held for safekeeping. The church wall on Holy Island where it once stood is now without it, and the stone itself exists in a kind of archival limbo, preserved but displaced, catalogued under a Galway reference number rather than a Clare one.