It is now held in an Office of Public Works depot in Athenry, Co. Galway, catalogued under a Galway reference number despite having originated in Clare. The stone was carved, by all appearances, somewhere around the eighth century, and its current resting place in a storage facility is, to put it plainly, an odd end for something of its age and quality.

The slab was first described in detail by the scholar R. A. S. Macalister, writing in 1916 to 1917, who recorded it on the north wall of the chancel of St. Caimin's church on Inis Cealtra, the island known in English as Holy Island. By the time the archaeologist de Paor examined it in the 1970s, the stone had migrated to the south wall of the nave, already displaced from its earlier position within the same building. Macalister measured it at roughly 48 centimetres by 33 centimetres, a modest tablet only about 7 centimetres thick. What it lacks in size it makes up for in intricacy. Within a double-lined circle sits a cross formed not from straight lines but from four arcs, each curving inward to meet the others and interlacing at the centre point. The arms terminate in spirals, and the spaces between the arms, the cantons, each carry a triskele, the three-limbed rotating motif that appears repeatedly in early medieval Irish carving. The geometry of the whole composition is tightly controlled, the kind of work that repays slow looking. Cross-slabs of this type are flat stones, usually without a shaft, incised or carved in relief with a cross design; they served as grave markers or devotional objects, and Inis Cealtra, a monastic island with a long history of early Christian activity, would have accumulated many of them over its active centuries.