Roughly 55 centimetres tall and 35 centimetres wide, it carries the ghost of an incised ringed cross, the kind cut in three parallel lines, a form associated with early medieval Ireland. Only the western half of the cross-head and two circular terminals at the base are now barely legible, worn down to the point where the carving reads more as shadow than as line.

The slab is set into the grounds of St Patrick's Redemptorist Monastery at Esker, near Athenry, but its reputed origin lies some distance away, at Clonmacnoise in County Offaly. Clonmacnoise is one of the great monastic sites of early Christian Ireland, founded in the sixth century on the bank of the River Shannon, and it generated a remarkable concentration of carved stone over the centuries, including hundreds of cross-slabs, flat grave markers incised with crosses and occasional inscriptions. This particular slab is said to have been removed from Clonmacnoise at around the turn of the twentieth century and brought to Esker, where it was eventually incorporated into the devotional landscape of the monastery grounds. The Stations of the Cross is a sequence of fourteen moments from the Passion narrative, and the 12th Station marks the crucifixion itself, which gives the re-use of a cross-bearing stone a certain internal logic, whatever one makes of how it came to be here.

The woodland walk at Esker is accessible within the monastery grounds, and the 12th Station is where the slab sits, visible but easy to pass without registering what it is. The carving is faint enough that low, raking light helps considerably when trying to read the form of the cross.