That particular absence is quietly telling. The slab in question is modest by any measure, standing roughly half a metre high and a quarter of a metre wide, with its base sunk below ground level. On its east face it carries an incised Latin cross with a circular panel at the centre and expanded triangular terminals at the head and each arm, a design typical of early medieval Irish stone carving. It is the kind of object that could easily be overlooked, overgrown, or shifted without record.

The stone sits within what was once an early ecclesiastical enclosure, the curved boundary that typically marks the original extent of an early Christian monastic or church site. This one lies about four and a half metres outside the west gable of the ruined church at Tullylease, itself a site with deep early medieval roots. Tullylease is already notable for its concentration of inscribed stonework; several other carved slabs survive within and around the church, making the enclosure something of an open-air collection of early Christian lapidary work. Cross-slabs of this type, upright stones incised with a cross, were used throughout early medieval Ireland as grave markers or boundary indicators, and the variety of cross forms found at a single site often reflects generations of use stretching across several centuries. When Henderson and Okasha visited in 1990, preparing their corpus of early Christian inscriptions, this particular slab was nowhere to be seen, which raises the unanswered question of whether it has since resurfaced, remains buried, or was moved at some point without documentation.