The slab is said to have originated at Mourne Abbey, some distance away, yet it was already in its current position by 1860, mortared into the boundary wall as though it had always been part of the fabric. Its carved decoration is elaborate and carefully worked: a seven-armed ringed cross with fleur-de-lis terminals, the shaft banded where it meets the cross-head, flanked by two raised square panels that were most likely intended to carry heraldic shields, though they were left plain. Below the cross, a leafy frond curls out from the left side of the shaft, and a raised border runs along three of the slab's surviving edges. How it came to be here, and by whose hand it was moved, remains unrecorded.

The graveyard itself sits on the west side of a laneway and is enclosed by a stone wall, roughly rectangular in plan and measuring around sixty metres east to west and eighty metres north to south. A southern extension visible on maps post-dating 1842 shows the site was still growing into the Victorian period. At its centre stands the former Church of Ireland parish church of Kilshannig, a dedication that reaches back to a charter of 1242. By 1615 the medieval church on this site had already been reported as ruinous, suggesting the current building represents a later phase of use on ground with a much longer ecclesiastical history. The graveyard is still in occasional use, and while most of the marked burials cluster to the south-east of the church, the oldest surviving headstones date from the late eighteenth century. Earlier monuments do exist: a seventeenth-century inscription on an altar-tomb near the south wall of the church, a box-tomb with an early eighteenth-century date, and a headstone inscribed with the year 1717. A box-tomb, sometimes called a chest-tomb, is a raised rectangular grave monument resembling a hollow box, common in Irish and English churchyards from the seventeenth century onward.