The slab is tapered, bevelled on all four sides, and fractured clean across the base of the cross-head into two pieces. It is the kind of object that rewards close attention, not because it is rare exactly, but because of what happened to it after its first life ended.

The slab belongs to a substantial group of medieval graveslabs recovered from Kells Priory, an Augustinian house whose canons, members of a religious order that followed the Rule of St Augustine and combined monastic life with pastoral work, used decorated funerary stonework as a way of marking the dead with some permanence. Stylistically, this particular example dates to the thirteenth or fourteenth century, a period when incised cross designs with trefoil terminals were a common but carefully executed convention in Irish funerary carving. What distinguishes its biography is what came later: at some point in the late medieval or post-medieval period, the slab was lifted from its original function and repurposed as a grave liner in the nave of the priory church. The carved face that had once looked upward was folded into the ground, doing structural work for a later burial. The scholar J. Higgins, writing in a 2007 volume on the priory's archaeological excavations, catalogued and described this slab alongside dozens of others recovered from the site, giving the collection one of the more thorough treatments of medieval funerary monuments in Irish ecclesiastical archaeology.