The stone itself is modest, less than half a metre tall and barely a hand's width across, yet the cross carved into it occupies most of that surface: twenty-eight centimetres high, eighteen wide. A Latin cross, with its longer lower arm, is among the earliest Christian symbols used in Ireland, and examples like this one were often set up to mark or sanctify a particular place rather than to serve as grave markers in the conventional sense. The lichen covering the stone suggests considerable age, though the weathering makes it difficult to say more than that.

What makes the setting quietly arresting is the company the stone keeps. About twenty metres to the north-west lie the remains of a rath, the levelled outline of what was once a circular earthwork enclosure of the kind built as a farmstead throughout early medieval Ireland, and alongside it a children's burial ground. Children's burial grounds, sometimes called cillíní, were used in Ireland well into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for the interment of unbaptised infants, who were excluded from consecrated ground under Catholic practice. Finding a cross-inscribed stone, an early enclosure, and a cillín so close together on a small Atlantic island suggests a layered local history of habitation, belief, and loss compressed into a very small area of ground. The views northward from the site take in Berehaven Harbour and the town of Castletownbere on the mainland opposite, a reminder that Bear Island, despite its remoteness, sat at the edge of one of the finest natural harbours on the south-west coast.