This particular slab, now resting against the east face of a surviving arcade on the west side of a transept, measures just over a metre and a third in length and tapers from roughly 47 centimetres at the top down to 39 centimetres at its broken base. It is a modest object by any measure, though the carving on its surface, a floriated cross in relief, meaning a cross whose arms branch into stylised foliage, gives it a quiet decorative ambition.

When the scholar R. A. S. Macalister documented the slab in 1913, it was lying inside the doorway as the first of four such slabs in a row, already fragmented and already doing duty as a grave marker. Macalister grouped it with a number of comparable slabs at Athenry and proposed a date of around 1680 for this style of floriated cross. A later assessment by McKeon, published in 2009, pushed that date back considerably, placing the slab in the 13th or 14th century. The difference is not trivial. If McKeon is right, the cross was carved during the high medieval period when Athenry was one of the more significant Anglo-Norman towns in Connacht, rather than in the post-Reformation decades Macalister had in mind. The two surviving fragments have since been moved from their earlier position to their current location in the transept, offering the slab a degree of shelter it presumably lacked when it was being walked past, and over, near the door.