It leans slightly eastward, which means one face is swallowed by the ground and the other is exposed to anyone who bothers to look closely. That exposed western face is where things get interesting: cut into the stone is a rectangular frame, 36 centimetres wide and 25 centimetres high, enclosing twelve square bosses arranged in a neat grid of three rows of four. One boss in the upper right corner has been deliberately defaced at some point, leaving a rough patch where the carving once was. On top of the stone, a circular socket, roughly 13 centimetres across and 11 centimetres deep with a bowl-shaped base, would have held an upright cross shaft. The shaft itself is long gone.

This piece is one of three cross-bases surviving at Aghowle, all of them now lacking their shafts and heads. A cross-base of this kind was essentially the anchor for a freestanding stone cross, a common feature of early medieval Irish ecclesiastical sites, where carved crosses marked sacred boundaries, served as focal points for prayer, or commemorated the dead. The Aghowle site as a whole has early medieval origins, and the placement of this particular base directly west of the church entrance follows a pattern seen elsewhere in Irish church enclosures, where crosses were positioned along meaningful axes relative to the building. Researcher Chris Corlett, writing in 2019, noted that the stone is crudely shaped but may well be in its original position, and that further decoration could yet be hidden on the faces still buried beneath the ground. The granite itself is typical of the Wicklow landscape, a hard, coarse-grained rock that has resisted weathering well enough to preserve the incised detail across what may be many centuries.

The stone rewards a slow look rather than a quick glance. The grid of bosses is not immediately obvious from a standing position, and the lean of the stone means visitors need to crouch toward the exposed western face to take in the decoration properly. The graveyard at Aghowle remains an active burial ground, so the usual consideration applies when moving among the stones.