Nothing about its current address, a storage facility catalogued under the townland of Raheen, suggests anything of the world it came from. The stone belongs, in every meaningful sense, to a lake island in Connacht's neighbouring province.

The slab was recovered during ground-clearance works on Inchbofin, an island in Lough Ree on the County Westmeath shore, where the remains of an early church stand. Cross-slabs of this type, flat stones incised with a simple outline cross, are among the most common surviving markers from early medieval Irish Christianity, used to denote burial or sacred ground, often predating the elaborate high crosses that drew later scholarly attention. This particular example, catalogued as Slab F in the Commissioners of Public Works report for the year ending March 1913, is modest even by those standards: irregular in shape, barely seven centimetres thick, its cross cut in a single line. The slightly enlarged terminals, where each arm of the cross broadens just a little, are a detail frequently seen on early medieval examples across Ireland and may reflect local carving conventions or simply individual craft. The 1913 report that first documented it was the eighty-first annual report of the Commissioners of Public Works in Ireland, published by HMSO in London, suggesting the stone had come to official notice as part of a wider programme of recording monuments at a time when many early ecclesiastical sites were being catalogued for the first time.

The gap between origin and present location is the quietly strange thing here. Removed from an island church on Lough Ree during clearance works over a century ago, the stone ended up far from its home waters, held in a depot serving a county it has no historical connection to. The church on Inchbofin, and the burial ground around it, remain on the island; the slab that once lay in their vicinity does not.