Local tradition holds that it was brought here from High Island, one of the small, storm-exposed islands off the Connemara coast that served as an early Christian monastic retreat. But scholars who have examined its carving in detail argue that the stone almost certainly originated somewhere else entirely, on Caher Island, a similarly remote and windswept site further south off the Mayo coast.

The slab measures a metre in height, 0.34 metres wide, and just seven centimetres thick, a modest enough object until you look closely at what is worked into its surface. A Latin cross, the familiar equal-or-longer-armed form used across early Christian Europe, is cut in bold relief against a deliberately sunken background, all of it framed within a weathered outer margin. What gives the carving its particular character are the bosses, raised circular projections that appear at the centre of the cross and again at the midpoint of each arm, five in total. A small projection appears on either side of the top arm, a detail that links the stone formally to carvings documented on Caher Island itself, reinforcing the case for its original home. The islands off the west coast of Ireland were, from roughly the sixth century onwards, favoured sites for early Christian communities, and the carved slabs they left behind form a distinct regional tradition whose individual pieces have often been moved, lost, or quietly absorbed into mainland graveyards over the centuries.