Tapered and chamfered in the manner typical of early ecclesiastical stonework, these slabs once carried carved decoration but now offer nothing to read; whatever imagery or inscription they held has been erased by time, weather, or handling, leaving only the outline of their form to suggest they were ever more than plain stone.

The slabs sit within the ruins of Corcomroe, a Cistercian abbey founded in the Burren whose stonework has attracted antiquarian attention for well over a century. In 1893, the Association for the Preservation of the Memorials of the Dead recorded four slabs at the site that still bore crosses at that point, a detail that makes the current blankness of several others all the more telling. The contrast between those four documented cross-bearing examples and the remaining uncarved slabs hints at how much has been lost even within a single, relatively well-studied site. The chamfering on a graveslab, where the edges are cut at an angle rather than left square, is a finishing detail that required deliberate craft, which makes it worth pausing over even when the central field of the stone is bare.