Measuring just 32 centimetres high and 29 centimetres wide, it carries a roll-moulding along one edge, that smooth, rounded ridge of carved stone that was a common decorative feature of early medieval ecclesiastical carving in Ireland. Whether it is the remnant of a cross-shaft, a structural element of the church itself, or something else entirely, remains genuinely uncertain.

The church it rests against is St. Caimin's, one of several early Christian structures surviving on Inishcaltra, an island with a monastic history stretching back to the sixth and seventh centuries. The fragment sits roughly two metres from the eastern end of the nave. The scholar R.A.S. Macalister, writing between 1916 and 1917, described and illustrated what appears to be a related piece, catalogued as number 79 in his survey, and it is possible that this small fragment belongs to the same object. A cross-shaft, in early Irish contexts, would typically have formed the upright section of a free-standing high cross, those elaborately carved stone monuments that served as focal points for prayer, procession, and communal gathering at monastic sites. That this piece might be a surviving portion of such an object, however modest in scale, gives it a quiet significance that its dimensions alone would not suggest.