The stone did not begin its life here. It was brought down from Kilmashogue Mountain, where it would once have marked a grave in the open air, exposed to the weather of the Dublin Mountains, far from any college chapel.

The slab is a modest piece of work in terms of scale, measuring 0.69 metres in length, 0.26 metres wide, and just 0.07 metres thick, but it rewards close attention. The head is circular and carries a Greek cross, which has arms of equal length, rendered in double incised lines set within a circle, with a raised line running around the outer edge of the head. The lower shaft is decorated, though the base is plain and unworked, suggesting it was originally set upright in the ground or slotted into a separate stone base, as was common practice with early Christian grave markers across Ireland. Cross-slabs of this type, simple incised stones marking Christian burials, were produced in Ireland from roughly the sixth century onwards, often associated with early monastic sites or isolated mountain oratories. That one should have existed on Kilmashogue Mountain is not surprising; the Dublin Mountains contain several traces of early ecclesiastical activity. The slab was documented by Ó hÉailidhe and Prendergast in 1977, who recorded it with a measured drawing.

The College of St. Columba is a boarding school situated at Whitechurch Road, Rathfarnham, and the chapel where the stone now resides is not a public visitor attraction in any straightforward sense. Access to the interior would require prior arrangement with the college. The stone is worth knowing about, however, for anyone with an interest in early Christian sculpture, or in the way that objects moved from upland sites into institutional care during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, often with their original context only partially recorded.