It has not always stood in that spot. The stone was found half buried in the graveyard outside, its purpose and original position unknown, before being propped upright against the church wall where it now rests with roughly twenty centimetres of its base still sunk into the ground.

The pillar itself is just over a metre tall in total, narrow enough to hold in two hands, and decorated with a sequence of carved symbols that climb from base to rounded top in a kind of deliberate order. Lowest is a raised plain cross, then, thirty centimetres higher, an incised cross set within a circle. Above that come two small circular depressions, cupped into the surface like shallow wells, interspersed with a second raised cross whose arms are noticeably shorter than the one below. The alternation of relief carving and incised work, crosses and hollows, gives the stone a layered quality, as though different hands or different intentions accumulated on its surface over time. Writing in 1923, Henry S. Crawford drew comparisons between this pillar and similar stones found south of Dublin, suggesting a tradition of such monuments that extended well beyond any single monastic community. The church it now inhabits dates to the tenth or eleventh century, and the pillar is not alone: two other cross-inscribed pillars survive in the same building, making Clonamery an unusually concentrated site for this type of early medieval stone carving.

These pillar stones belong to a broader category of early Christian monument, upright stones marked with crosses that served commemorative, boundary, or devotional functions, though the precise meaning of any individual example is rarely certain. The circular depressions on this stone add a further layer of ambiguity; similar cups appear on prehistoric stones across Ireland, and their presence here, whether coincidental or deliberate, is not easily explained. The stone invites close looking precisely because it offers no single, tidy reading.