It is not on display. It is not in the county where it originated. And the island it came from, Inchbofin on Lough Ree in County Westmeath, is a different Inchbofin entirely from the more widely known Atlantic island of the same name off the Galway coast. The fragment is all that remains of an early medieval cross-slab, the kind of incised stone marker that once stood in or around monastic enclosures across Ireland, identifying graves or commemorating the faithful.

The piece came to light during ground-clearance works near the church on Inchbofin island in Lough Ree, where an early ecclesiastical settlement once stood. What survives is enough to make out part of a D-shaped looped terminal belonging to a three-line cross, a style of incised decoration associated with early Christian stonework in Ireland. A three-line cross, as the name suggests, is formed from three parallel incised lines rather than a single cut, giving the design a degree of refinement. An illustration included in the 1913 annual report of the Commissioners of Public Works recorded the fragment as Slab H, and Crawford, writing the same year, noted its dimensions as one foot by seven inches, roughly 0.3 metres by 0.17 metres. Even at its original size, it would have been a modest object. What portion has been lost entirely is unknown.

The depot in Athenry, in the townland of Raheen, is where the fragment is officially listed as being held. It is not a place a visitor could simply walk into, and the stone is not accessible for casual viewing. Its situation, removed from its island origin, catalogued but unseen, is itself a quiet reflection of how much early medieval material has passed through the hands of state agencies over the past century, preserved in one sense, and yet effectively absent from the landscape that gave it meaning.