It is less than eighty centimetres long, chipped at one end, and decorated on one face only. That decoration is what makes it worth pausing over: a central incised line runs the full length of the slab, and on either side of it, six diagonal lines branch outwards in a rough herringbone pattern. Near the broken end, a shallow round-bottomed cupmark, about six centimetres across, interrupts the central line. A cupmark is exactly what it sounds like, a small circular depression carved or ground into stone, a form found on prehistoric monuments across Ireland and Britain, though their precise meaning remains contested. Here, the cupmark and herringbone together give the slab an almost textile quality, as if someone had sketched a length of woven cloth in granite.

The slab is recorded in the Sites and Monuments Record under the reference DU023-023020-, and its decoration was documented and published by Ó hÉailidhe in 1982, with further coverage in a volume edited by K. Swords in 2009. The stone measures 0.79 metres in length, between 0.47 and 0.40 metres in width, and just 0.07 metres thick, making it a relatively modest piece. It is a graveslab, a category of carved funerary marker found across medieval Ireland, though the combination of the herringbone incision and the cupmark is unusual enough to have attracted specific scholarly attention. The survey notes compiled by Geraldine Stout and Padraig Clancy place it firmly near the northern boundary of the graveyard, which helps narrow down the search considerably.

Dalkey itself is easily reached by DART from Dublin city centre, and the graveyard is walkable from the village. The slab is a quiet thing and does not announce itself; the herringbone pattern is incised rather than raised, so low-angle light, the kind you get on an overcast afternoon or in the earlier morning hours, makes the decoration considerably easier to read. The broken end, where the cupmark sits, is worth examining closely. The decoration exists on one face only, so if the slab has shifted or been repositioned over the years, it is worth checking the orientation before concluding there is nothing to see.