It is not a headstone in any conventional sense, but a graveslab, pointed at the top and carrying on its west face a latin cross rendered not in relief but by a shallow incised groove, barely a centimetre deep and two centimetres wide. The cross itself curves very slightly, a detail easy to miss unless the light falls at the right angle, and yet that small deviation from the perfectly geometric is what gives the stone its quiet, handmade character.

The slab is granite, measuring just over a metre in height, sixty centimetres wide, and eighteen centimetres thick. The cross it bears runs to eighty-eight centimetres, occupying most of the face. Incised graveslabs of this kind, where the cross design is cut into the surface rather than raised from it, are found at early medieval ecclesiastical sites across Ireland, and they typically predate the more elaborate tomb monuments that arrived with the Anglo-Norman period. Their simplicity is not poverty of craftsmanship but a different convention altogether, one in which the act of marking a grave required little more than a stone, a chisel, and the outline of a cross. Dunboyke church itself, to the north-west of the slab, is a ruined medieval structure, and the graveslab sits in the kind of relationship to it that suggests long use of the same ground for burial, with the slab placed at the chancel corner where the sacred and the commemorative overlap.