Within it lies a graveslab that spent some portion of its existence face down by the door in the south wall of a church, its carved surface pressed against the earth, unseen. That it survived at all is something of a quiet accident of history.

The slab belongs to a category known as the Rathdown type, a group of early medieval grave markers found along the coastline of south County Dublin and north County Wicklow, distinguished by their deeply incised or relief-carved geometric ornament. This particular example, measuring 1.65 metres in length and just over half a metre wide, carries a ringed Latin Cross, the kind in which a circle intersects the arms of the cross, with a cupmark, a small deliberately carved hollow, at its centre. Below the shaft of the cross, a second cupmark sits within a large circle. At either end of the slab, groups of concentric circles each carry their own central cupmark, and along both long edges of the decorated face run semi-circular loops. The combination is unusual even within the Rathdown corpus, and the slab is documented in Ó hÉailidhe's 1957 study of the group, as well as in a later edited volume by K. Swords published in 2009.

The graveyard is accessible from the junction of Castle Street and Ormeau Drive, and its raised position makes it noticeable if you know to look. The slab itself is worth examining closely; the relief carving rewards slow attention rather than a glance, and the layering of symbolic forms, cross, cupmarks, concentric circles, is easier to read in oblique light, particularly on an overcast day when shadows settle into the carved lines without being washed out by direct sun.