On one face, incised into the rock, are the words OROIT DO MURCHAD, meaning 'Pray for Murchad'. We do not know who Murchad was, or who thought him worth commemorating in stone. The slab itself is modest to the point of anonymity, just 30 centimetres tall, 12 centimetres wide, and 8 centimetres thick. Yet it crossed the country to reach Dublin, lifted from the island monastery where it had stood for centuries and registered into a museum collection in 1971.

The slab originated on Inishmurray, a small island off the coast of County Sligo that was home to one of Ireland's early medieval monastic settlements. It was first recorded in 1866 by Dunraven, with the record later published by Petrie in 1878, and it stood within Teach Molaise, the church associated with the island's patron saint. A cross-slab is essentially a flat or roughly shaped stone onto which a cross has been carved, often serving as a grave marker or votive object within an early Christian site. This example carries an incised ringed cross on its principal face, a form in which the arms of the cross are enclosed within a circle, shafted and rising from an oblong base. The upper arm terminates in what is described as a flat-butted serif, though the terminals of the horizontal arms have not survived. The damaged inscription on the reverse was read by the scholar Macalister, whose reading broadly agreed with an earlier transcription by Wakeman. A detailed archaeological survey of Inishmurray conducted between 1997 and 1999, and published by Jerry O'Sullivan and Tomás Ó Carragáin in 2008, provided the fullest modern description of the object and its original context.

The slab is held by the National Museum of Ireland under register number 1971:1117. Visitors to the museum's collection of early medieval material would be the most likely to encounter it, though whether it is currently on display or held in storage is worth checking before a visit. Its original island home, Inishmurray, remains accessible only by boat from the Sligo coast and only in suitable weather, but the archaeological record of the wider site, including the church where this stone once stood, is documented in the O'Sullivan and Ó Carragáin volume for those who want to understand what surrounded it before the crossing to Dublin.