That alone would make it worth pausing over, but the subtlety of the carving is what catches the eye: on one side, a Latin cross outlined in the stone with slight rounded hollows cut into each of the four angles; on the reverse, the same basic design, but the hollows are doubled, giving the angles a more elaborated, almost bracketed appearance. It is a quiet exercise in variation, the kind of detail that suggests a craftsperson working through a formal problem rather than simply repeating a pattern.

The slab, catalogued as 35A/35B by the scholar Ó hÉailidhe in 1967, is one of many such carved stones gathered at St. Berrihert's Kyle, an early ecclesiastical enclosure associated with the obscure early Irish saint Berrihert. The site lies within a larger enclosure, and in 1946 the Office of Public Works constructed an oval stone enclosure, stepped internally, to house and protect the collection of cross-slabs. The little red sandstone piece now rests on the wall of that enclosure in its north-east sector, elevated and exposed rather than buried or hidden away. Cross-slabs of this type are among the most characteristic monuments of early medieval Irish Christianity, essentially grave markers or devotional stones incised with a cross, and they survive in considerable numbers at sites associated with early monastic communities. What is less common is a slab that uses both faces to present two related but distinct versions of the same motif.