At the western gable of a ruined medieval church in Ballymore Eustace, a granite slab stands upright in the earth, quietly doing what it has done for centuries. It is not lying flat in the manner of a conventional grave marker, but set vertically into the ground, tapering as it rises to just over a metre in height. On its eastern face, someone long ago incised a Latin cross, a simple but deliberate act of marking, and the stone has held that mark ever since.

The slab sits within a graveyard that grew up around the church ruins, a common enough arrangement in medieval Ireland where the sanctified ground of an earlier foundation continued to draw the dead long after the building itself fell out of use. The stone is earthfast, meaning it is partially buried and fixed in place, and its dimensions, roughly half a metre wide at the base and twenty-five centimetres thick, suggest a substantial piece of granite worked with some care. Ciarán Corlett, writing in 2003, catalogued it as Slab 2 in his survey of the site, placing it within a broader tradition of early Christian and medieval grave markers found across the country, stones that communicated identity and faith through a carved cross rather than through inscription or portraiture.