One of them is a cross-slab, a carved stone of the kind used in early medieval Ireland to mark graves or commemorate the dead, and it survives only partially, measuring less than half a metre in either direction. What makes it quietly arresting is not its size but what it preserves and what it has lost.

The archaeologist R.A.S. Macalister examined the fragment in the mid-1910s and recorded what he could make out: part of the stem of a three-line cross set within a rectangular single-line frame, with simple decorative corner pieces, only one of which had survived intact by his time. He noted that the carved lines were clogged with cement, which suggests the stone had already been worked into some kind of structure or repair before he got to it, obscuring detail that might otherwise have been legible. The cross-slab is one of several early Christian carved stones associated with Inis Cealtra, an island with a long monastic history and a cluster of medieval churches, round towers, and burial enclosures that together make it one of the more archaeologically layered sites in the west of Ireland. The Saint's Graveyard, on the outer wall of which the fragment is now mounted, sits within this broader complex.