What they do carry are crosses, carved in what observers have consistently described as an ancient pattern, a phrase that gestures toward early medieval stoneworking traditions in which the form of the cross itself, rather than any written inscription, was considered sufficient marker for the dead.

The slabs were noted by the historian William Carrigan in 1905, who recorded them as uninscribed but bearing crosses of ancient pattern. More than sixty years later, a separate observer named Buggy noted what appear to be the same two pieces of stone in much the same terms, describing inscribed crosses of ancient pattern. The near-identical language across two independent accounts, separated by decades, suggests these slabs have changed little and attracted a consistent kind of quiet attention. Whether the two sets of references describe precisely the same stones remains uncertain, but the continuity of description is striking in itself. Graveslabs of this kind, unlettered and identified only by their carved crosses, are among the older categories of grave marker found at Irish ecclesiastical sites, pre-dating the tradition of personalised funerary inscription that became widespread in the post-medieval period.