It is a quietly unsettling detail: a slab intended to mark the dead, bearing ornate early medieval carving, pressed into architectural service and left there until the twentieth century.

The slab measures 1.32 metres long and 0.48 metres wide, and its surface carries two groups of concentric circles with cup marks at their centres, a central band running along the stone, and a herringbone pattern, a decorative motif common in early Christian stonework in Ireland. It is one of two early graveslabs recorded at the Ballyman site, and the carving style places it within a tradition of early medieval funerary monuments found across the island. In 1940 it was removed from the church and transferred to the National Museum of Ireland, where it is held under registration number 1940:106. The slab is documented in P. Ó hÉailidhe's 1973 survey and later referenced in a 2009 publication by Swords, and a photograph taken in February 2012 by Christiaan Corlett provides the most widely accessible visual record of it.

The slab itself is no longer at Ballyman; a visit to the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin is the only way to see it in person. For anyone with an interest in early medieval stonework, it is worth seeking out in the collections. The Ballyman church site, however, retains its own atmosphere, and the second graveslab recorded there, catalogued separately, adds further context to what was clearly a site of some significance in the early Christian period.