It is a cross-base, pyramidal in shape and not much more than half a metre tall, and the cross it once held is long gone. What remains is stranger and more quietly puzzling than a complete monument might be. Three of its four faces carry carvings framed by incised panels, but the stone has worn badly and nobody can say with confidence what those carvings show. The north face bears a rounded human figure with arms stretched outward and hands raised, a posture that resembles the Orans position, the ancient attitude of prayer with palms lifted toward heaven. At the figure's feet there may be a serpent. The east face is divided into four quadrants by a double-line cross. The west face carries an hourglass or figure-of-eight shape that might be a face or something else entirely. The fourth face is now smooth, possibly worn clean of whatever it once showed.

The place takes its name from the Irish word dísirt, meaning a hermitage or place of withdrawal, and the monastery here was founded in the late eighth or early ninth century by a saint called Maol Tuile, who died before the year 830. He was reputedly the son of Nóchaire of the Ceinéal Laoghaire of Meath, and he was associated with Maol Ruain of Tallaght, a figure central to the Céli Dé reform movement of that period. Maol Tuile left a considerable trace in the medieval record. The Martyrology of Donegal assigned him a feast day of the 29th of May and credited his pastoral staff, his baculus, with the power to work miracles on perjurers before they left the church. The same text noted that his holy well, his yellow bell, his staff, and his statue were all still present at the time of writing. By 1837, when John O'Donovan was compiling his Ordnance Survey Letters, the wells were still being visited on or around his feast day, though O'Donovan noted that this practice had lapsed some thirty years earlier. A second saint of the same name, Maoltuile son of Nochar, appears in the Martyrology with a separate feast day on the 30th of July.

The carved figure on the cross-base, for all the uncertainty surrounding it, has been compared to a similarly naive depiction of the crucified Christ on a cross shaft in Killaloe Cathedral, County Clare. Whether it shows a crucifixion, a monk at prayer, or something else, that ambiguity is itself part of what makes this small, overlooked stone worth pausing over.