It measures roughly 41 by 23 centimetres, not much larger than a hardback book, and on one face it carries a single incised Latin cross. No inscription, no ornament, just the plain geometry of two lines crossing. Whether it was ever fixed upright in the ground or simply laid flat, nobody now knows for certain, though it is thought to have served at some point as a gravemarker.

The stone belongs to an Early Christian church site known as Kilcolman, or Cill na gColmán in Irish, the church of the Colmáns. The site sits within a landscape on the Dingle Peninsula that is extraordinarily dense with early medieval remains. A cill, in this context, refers to a small ecclesiastical enclosure, often a founding saint's hermitage or a local church serving a rural community in the period roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. The cross-inscribed stone is one of several recorded features within the enclosure, documented as part of J. Cuppage's archaeological survey of the Corca Dhuibhne region published in 1986. By that time the stone had already come loose from whatever its original position may have been and was lying in the north-eastern part of the enclosure. Whether it shifted through deliberate removal, agricultural disturbance, or simply the slow work of time is not recorded.