The enclosure functions as a kind of shrine, separating its contents from the wider burial ground and signalling, without any fanfare, that what stands inside is considered different in kind from an ordinary grave marker.

The stone itself is modest in its dimensions, roughly seventy centimetres tall, thirty wide, and twenty deep, but what it carries is more significant than its size suggests. Cut into its east-facing surface is a Latin cross whose arms end in T-shaped terminals, a decorative feature found on early medieval Irish stonework, where the splayed ends lend the cross a distinctive, almost architectural quality. By long tradition, this stone marks the grave of St. Deirbhile, an early Irish saint to whom the adjacent church is dedicated. Ordnance Survey maps from both 1838 and 1921 record the spot as "St Dervla's Grave", which speaks to the persistence of this identification across generations and across significant social change. The anglicised form of the name, Dervla, sits alongside the older Irish Deirbhile on the historical record, a small example of how saints' cults were carried forward even as the language around them shifted.

The shrine enclosure, a low walled rectangular plot immediately north of the church ruin, is straightforward to locate within the graveyard. The incised cross is on the stone's east face, so approaching from that side gives the clearest view of the carving and its T-terminals.