It props up one side of a low, mortared grave enclosure that cuts across the church floor, its ancient ogham inscription, a writing system used in early medieval Ireland in which notches and scores along a central stem-line encode letters, tilting slightly northward and facing outward along the wall's eastern face. The stone was almost certainly not carved here. It was repurposed, folded into later construction, and somewhere below the present ground surface, its inscription continues downward, unread.

T. J. Westropp noted the stone in 1914, describing it as one of a pair of tall pillars flanking a walled burial space seven feet wide that spanned the full width of the church. He recorded traces of notches and faint straight and slant scores, the characteristic marks of ogham, along the stone's naturally squared edge. More recent examination found the upper portion so badly weathered that no reading is possible, though legible marks, including what appears to be the letter R, survive lower down before the stone disappears into the earth. The church itself was known as Cross Abbey by the time the Ordnance Survey mapped it in 1921, and it belonged to a priory of Augustinian Canons, functioning as a cell of Ballintubber Abbey in County Mayo. The grave enclosure that now holds the ogham stone is relatively late; it was built across a doorway in the church's northern wall, meaning the stone was incorporated into a structure that was itself a secondary alteration to an already-standing building. The graveyard surrounding the church is roughly D-shaped, its western boundary a cliff edge dropping to a rocky shoreline, with a long beach stretching away to the northeast.