It was not carved for Raheen. It came from High Island, a small and exposed island off the Connemara coast, where it once served as the footstone of a grave, its carved faces pressed close to the dead rather than displayed to the living.

The slab is made of garnet mica-schist, a metamorphic rock with a faintly lustrous, flecked texture, and it tapers to a rounded base before expanding upward with convex armpits into the rough shape of a cross with a squared head. Both faces carry decoration. The east face is the more complex of the two: irregular notches cut into the stone to define the head of an outline Latin cross, with irregular bosses at the upper armpits and, at the centre, a roundel enclosing an equal-armed linear cross whose three upper limbs each terminate in a fork. The west face carries a simpler version, a linear cross set on a single boss. When researchers recorded the grave it marked, they found skeletal remains dating from the early eleventh to the late twelfth century, though the slab itself was probably reused at that point, meaning its carving may be older still. High Island had an early medieval monastic community, and objects like this cross-slab, somewhere between a grave marker and a devotional object, are part of the material record of that world. The island context matters: these were communities that produced finely worked stone in circumstances of considerable physical isolation, and the care visible in the slab's carved roundel and forked terminals sits oddly against the roughness of the notching elsewhere, as though different hands, or different moments, were involved.