It carries on one face the partial outline of a cross-shaft carved in low relief, and on the other, nothing at all. For all its modesty, this is a piece of early medieval stonework that has survived within one of the more quietly remarkable sacred sites in Tipperary.

The enclosure in question is known as St. Berrihert's Kyle, a kyle being a word derived from the Irish coill, meaning a wood or sacred grove, and the site is associated with an early Christian saint whose cult was evidently strong enough to leave a physical legacy of carved stones. The oval stone enclosure that now contains and protects many of these pieces, stepped internally, was constructed by the Office of Public Works in 1946, giving a degree of formal arrangement to a collection that had presumably accumulated or survived in more scattered form. The cross-slab fragment, catalogued as slab 55 by the scholar Ó hÉailidhe in a 1967 study of the site, is among the smaller items in this gathering. Its dimensions, roughly twelve centimetres by twenty-four, with a thickness of five centimetres, suggest it is a broken piece of something once larger, the shaft of an incised cross that was either never finished or did not survive intact into the modern period.

The slab sits not inside the enclosure but on top of its wall in the eastern sector, which gives it a slightly exposed, almost incidental quality, as though it has been set aside rather than formally displayed. Visitors to St. Berrihert's Kyle will find a site that rewards slow attention; the collection of early Christian carved stones gathered within the OPW enclosure ranges considerably in scale and condition, and this small red sandstone fragment is easy to overlook precisely because it asks so little of the eye.