It is the lower portion of a cross-shaft, carved in such shallow relief that the design rises only three millimetres from the surface. The back is entirely plain. Easy to overlook, it is the kind of object that rewards a slow look rather than a passing glance.

The slab sits within St. Berrihert's Kyle at Ardane, an ecclesiastical enclosure whose name preserves the memory of an early Irish saint. The site contains a substantial collection of early medieval carved stones, and the cross-slab in question, catalogued as slab 71 by the scholar Ó hÉailidhe, is positioned in the northern sector of an oval stone enclosure, on top of the enclosing wall itself. That enclosure, which is stepped internally, was built by the Office of Public Works in 1946 to house and protect the collection of slabs gathered on the site. The slab measures roughly 38 centimetres by 23 centimetres, with a thickness of just six centimetres, and is cut from the red sandstone that is characteristic of the local geology. Cross-slabs of this type, flat stones incised or carved with a cross motif, are among the most common surviving traces of early Irish Christianity, often marking graves or serving as devotional objects within monastic enclosures. What survives here is not a complete cross but only the lower section of the shaft, suggesting the stone was already broken when it entered the collection, or broke at some point over the centuries since it was made.