Just over a metre long and less than half a metre wide, its surface is uneven, undecorated, and entirely without inscription. In a place crowded with early medieval history, that plainness is quietly arresting.

Inis Cealtra, known also as Holy Island, sits in Lough Derg on the Clare shore and was one of the more significant early Christian monastic sites in Ireland, associated with Saint Caimin and attracting pilgrimage for centuries. The Saint's graveyard, where this slab lies, is a designated burial ground within that complex, its very name suggesting it was considered a particularly sacred precinct. The slab itself was recorded by the archaeologist R.A.S. Macalister during his survey of the graveyard in 1916 and 1917, appearing on his published plan as a drawn but unnumbered feature, a detail that suggests it was noted and then, in some sense, set aside. Its precise position has since been recorded: 13.45 metres from the north wall and 4.06 metres from the east wall, coordinates that give it a kind of administrative identity it was never assigned in Macalister's original work.

A recumbent graveslab is simply a flat stone laid horizontally over a burial, one of the oldest and most common forms of grave marker in Ireland. What makes this one linger is the combination of its setting and its anonymity. It marks someone, or perhaps no one now traceable, in a graveyard of saints, on an island that drew the devout for generations, and it does so without a single carved line to explain why.