It measures 1.5 metres long and 0.57 metres wide, and its surface has been so thoroughly worn by centuries of weather and handling that only two shallow cup-marks remain visible. Those two small depressions are almost all that survives of what was once a decorated graveslab, and yet that near-erasure is precisely what makes it worth pausing over.

The slab belongs to a category known as Rathdown-type gravestones, a group of early medieval carved slabs found predominantly along the coastal strip of south Dublin and north Wicklow. The type takes its name from the wider Rathdown territory, and examples typically carry incised crosses, interlace, or cup-marks, the latter being simple circular hollows whose precise significance is still debated among scholars. This particular example at Rathmichael was recorded by Ó hEailidhe in 1957, and a drawing of the stone appears in Healy's 2009 study. The church it accompanies, recorded under the Sites and Monuments Record reference DU026-050001, is itself a ruin of some antiquity, set into the hillside below Carrickgollogan in what feels like a quietly forgotten corner of the Dublin Mountains fringe.

The stone is fixed to the eastern face of a buttress on the south wall of the church, so it is not lying flat as gravestones often are, but set upright and visible at roughly eye level if you know to look. The site sits on the eastern slopes of Carrickgollogan, accessible via the Rathmichael area south of Shankill. The surrounding churchyard remains in occasional use, and the ruins are generally accessible. For those who want to examine the carving in more detail than the worn surface readily allows, a three-dimensional digital model of the stone is available online at skfb.ly/oHrtD, where the subtle relief of the cup-marks can be examined from any angle.