It is not a monument in the conventional sense, not built to commemorate or impress, but to be used, walked around, and prayed at. That quiet purposefulness is what makes it quietly arresting.

Inishglora, known in Irish as Inis Gluaire, is said to have been the site of a monastery founded by St. Brendan the Navigator, the sixth-century monk whose legendary sea voyages carried him, in tradition if not in verified history, as far as the Americas. The eastern end of the island preserves the remains of that monastic settlement, and this slab is one of several penitential stations that formed part of the devotional round, a structured circuit of prayer stops, sometimes called a pattern, that pilgrims would complete when visiting the site. The slab itself stands 1.65 metres above its cairn, tapers slightly toward the top, and has a flat western face with a gently convex eastern surface on the lower half. It sits at the centre of what would once have been the monastic precinct: St. Brendan's chapel lies roughly ten metres to the east, the structure known as Templenafear, or the Men's church, is fifteen metres to the south-east, and a cluster of three clochans, the small dry-stone beehive huts associated with early Irish monasticism, sits about twenty metres to the west. An archive photograph from the early 1900s shows the monument looking much as it does today, the cairn intact, the slab upright, its purpose long since lapsed but its form preserved almost perfectly by the island's remove from the mainland.