The text reads "OR D.. INGANE", which is complete in the sense that no letters are missing, yet two characters remain stubbornly unclear, leaving the name of whoever is commemorated here just out of reach across roughly nine centuries.

The slab lies on Inis Cealtra, a monastic island off the Clare shore long associated with early Christian settlement, within the enclosure known as the Saint's graveyard. A cross-slab is a flat grave marker incised with a cross rather than carved in relief, and this one, dated to the twelfth century by the antiquarian R.A.S. Macalister writing in 1916 and 1917, would originally have measured around 1.45 metres in length. It now survives as one large piece, itself broken in two, measuring 0.91 metres by 0.61 metres. The cross cut into its surface is a Latin form with hollowed angles and an expanded base with concave sides, a relatively refined design for a grave marker of the period. The inscription runs mostly in a horizontal line across the top of the cross, with a single letter placed inside the upper arm. Scholars Elisabeth Okasha and Katherine Forsyth, writing in 2001, confirmed the text as complete: "OR" is almost certainly an abbreviation of the Irish oroit, meaning "a prayer for", a formula common on early medieval Irish memorial stones. What follows is a name, partially obscured, ending in "INGANE". Whether that represents a woman's name or a patronymic remains uncertain.