Together they amount to less than half of what was once a carved grave slab, broken and buried in rubble along the northern edge of a rural churchyard in County Longford. The piece is not large, not intact, and not on public display, yet it carries the partial name of a person who died perhaps a thousand years ago, rendered in letters that are, according to those who recorded it, still clearly cut.

The slab originally came from Taghshinny graveyard, one of two cross-slabs recorded at that site. It was found loose in the rubble close to the north wall in 1999, and removed shortly afterwards by the National Museum for safekeeping. What survives retains enough of the original design to reconstruct its form: a Latin cross with a double outline, a circular expansion at the centre, and semicircular terminals at the arms, the kind of decorative scheme found on early medieval Irish grave markers. A cross-slab, to be precise, is a flat stone incised rather than carved in relief, used to mark a burial and often carrying an inscription asking for a prayer on behalf of the named person. The surviving terminal here is decorated with a key pattern, a geometric interlace motif common in Insular art, and the same pattern appears at the central device. On the sinister side of the cross, meaning the left side as you face it, an incomplete inscription runs vertically. The surviving letters, AELM, A, RE, are enough to reconstruct a likely original reading of or do maelmaire, an Old Irish phrase meaning "a prayer for Maelmaire," a name meaning "devotee of Mary." The record was compiled by Caimin O'Brien and uploaded in May 2023 as part of the Sites and Monuments Record.

The stone itself is not accessible to the general visitor in any conventional sense. It resides in the National Museum's collection at Kildare Street, and museum collections of this kind are held in storage rather than on open display. Anyone with a specific research interest can contact the museum directly to enquire about access to registered objects. The original findspot, Taghshinny graveyard in County Longford, is cross-referenced in the monument record under a related entry, and the site itself may reward a visit for those interested in early ecclesiastical remains, though the slab is no longer there to be found among the rubble where it lay for who knows how long before 1999.