Carved into its face is a Latin cross with expanded terminals, a design in which the arms flare outward at their ends, alongside what researchers identify as an early evolving form of the IHS monogram. That Christogram, derived from the first three letters of Jesus in Greek, was widely used in Catholic devotional contexts, but the version here sits at an interesting transitional moment, caught somewhere between earlier insular cross traditions and the more standardised ecclesiastical lettering that would follow. The slab is tentatively dated to the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century.

The graveyard itself, known in Irish as Ráithín Uí Bhuaigh and sometimes rendered in English as Raheenyhooig, occupies elevated ground at around fifty metres above sea level, sloping northward and overlooking Dingle Harbour less than a kilometre away. Its history is legible in layers. The name contains the word ráithín, meaning a small rath or enclosure, and the burial ground preserves traces of an earlier circular enclosure of that kind beneath its present form. A survey carried out by Laurence Dunne in 2010 identified a coherent section of this early enclosure and recorded at least thirty archaeological artefacts across the site, most of them cross-slabs. Sixteen of those slabs had not previously been recorded at all, and they are concentrated around the centre of the graveyard, within the footprint of that older enclosure. The 1896 second edition Ordnance Survey map, examined as part of the same study, reveals that the site underwent substantial remodelling in 1870 under Lord Ventry, who planted trees, constructed squared-off enclosing banks, laid a new roadway, built a family mausoleum marked on the map simply as "Vault", and added an L-shaped pathway. The curving hachures visible on that map, used by cartographers to indicate sloping or uneven ground, preserve a ghost outline of the earlier raheen beneath all that Victorian intervention.