Look more carefully, though, and it turns out to carry two quite different decorative programmes, one on each face, as though the carver treated the stone's two sides as entirely separate surfaces rather than aspects of the same object.

The pillar stands 2.21 metres high and tapers slightly from base to top, inclining a little to the south. Its western face is rough and carries a plain Latin cross, the most straightforward of early Christian cross forms. The eastern face has been dressed smooth and bears something considerably more elaborate: a double-ringed Latin cross rendered in two incised lines, with the shaft terminating in a circle that contains a smaller Greek crosslet, a cross with four equal arms, cut inside it. That combination of the ring-headed cross with an internal crosslet is a detail worth pausing over, since it layers two distinct cross types into a single composition. The church nearby, roughly eight metres to the east, is known locally as Teampall Mac Duach, a dedication that connects it to Saint Colman Mac Duach, the seventh-century founder associated with the Burren and with Kilmacduagh in County Galway. Whether the pillar predates the church, was erected alongside it, or was moved to its present position at some later point is not recorded, but the pairing of a worked face and an unworked face on the same stone suggests either two phases of decoration or a deliberate contrast in register between the two sides.