At roughly half a metre long and forty centimetres wide, it is an unassuming thing, and offers the visitor nothing in the way of carved ornament or inscription. What makes it quietly peculiar is its biography rather than its appearance.

A graveslab is, broadly, a flat stone placed over or associated with a burial, and examples found across Ireland range from elaborately carved medieval monuments to plain unmarked slabs whose only purpose was to mark that someone lay beneath. This particular example, recorded in the archaeological survey compiled by Geraldine Stout and Padraig Clancy and published in the edited volume by K. Swords in 2009, had at some point been removed from its original funerary context and repurposed as a lintel, the horizontal beam above a doorway or window opening, in the south wall of the church. The stone, being granite, would have been durable enough to serve a structural function without much deterioration, which perhaps explains why it was pressed into service in this way. At some later point it was removed from that secondary position and placed in the graveyard, returning it, in a loose sense, to the kind of setting it was first intended for.

The church and its associated graveyard are recorded under the Sites and Monuments Record references DU023-023002 and DU023-023020 respectively, which gives a researcher or curious visitor a reliable way to locate them in the national database. The slab itself carries no visible decoration, so anyone expecting carved knotwork or a legible inscription will find none. What remains is the stone itself and the question of whose grave it once marked, a question the surviving record does not answer. The site is in Dalkey, a coastal town south of Dublin, and the graveyard can be approached as part of a broader look at the cluster of medieval remains the area retains.