What makes this one quietly curious is the detail recorded about its intended purpose: researchers believe it was never meant to lie flat at all. The slab, which measures 1.67 metres in length and between 0.4 and 0.5 metres in width, was most likely designed to stand upright, functioning as a grave marker in the manner of a headstone rather than a horizontal covering slab. Somewhere along the way, that intention was abandoned, or the stone simply fell and was never raised again, and it has spent an indeterminate span of time slowly sinking into the earth at a gentle tilt.

The stone is cut from granite, which is the local material of choice in this part of south County Dublin, and its profile is convex rather than flat, giving it a slightly rounded, almost shield-like cross-section 0.16 metres thick. The church it belongs to, Rathmichael, sits on the eastern slopes of Carrickgollogan, a low hill on the southern fringes of the Dublin mountains. The site is recorded in the National Monuments register under the reference DU026-050002-, and the details of the graveslab were compiled by archaeologists Geraldine Stout and Padraig Clancy, later revised by Caimin O'Brien. The scholarly assessment of its intended upright position comes from work published in 2009 by Healy and Swords.

Rathmichael church is a ruined early medieval site with a small surrounding graveyard, accessible without great difficulty from the road that skirts the lower slopes of Carrickgollogan. The graveslab lies to the south of the church remains, partially obscured by soil and vegetation, so it rewards a slow circuit of the site rather than a quick glance from the path. The convex shape is easier to appreciate when you crouch down and look along the length of the stone, where the curve of the upper surface becomes more obvious. Given how much of it is buried, the visible portion alone gives a reasonable sense of its scale, though the full length of 1.67 metres extends below ground level.