The stone carries a cross unlike the standard Latin or equal-armed forms found across early Irish ecclesiastical sites: two diagonal lines brace both arms of the main cross from beneath, and a series of further diagonal lines radiate outward and upward from the upper shaft, giving the whole design an almost sun-burst quality. Flanking the left arm are two small equal-armed crosses, one above and one below, and just above the lower of these the letters J C are cut into the surface. Lightly incised, easy to miss, it sits close to a companion slab of similarly faint markings.

The graveyard's history is layered in ways the landscape only partly reveals. The Irish name, Ráithín Uí Bhuaigh, meaning something close to "the little ringfort of the Buagh family", points to early medieval origins, and a raheen, a small circular enclosure of the kind typically associated with early ecclesiastical or secular settlement, once defined the burial ground's limits. By the time the second edition Ordnance Survey map was published in 1896, that earlier enclosure had been substantially obscured by the interventions of Lord Ventry, who in 1870 reshaped the site considerably: trees were planted, squared-off enclosing banks and a new roadway were constructed, and a mausoleum, marked on the map simply as "Vault", was added. An L-shaped pathway completed the Victorian reordering of the space. The curving hachures on that same map, however, still trace the ghost of the earlier circular boundary.

It was a graveyard survey conducted by Laurence Dunne in 2010 that brought the stone to wider attention. The survey identified at least thirty archaeological artefacts at the site, the majority of them cross-slabs, a term for flat stones bearing incised cross designs that are a characteristic form of early Christian memorial in Ireland. Sixteen of the cross-slabs recorded during that survey had not previously been documented. They are concentrated within the area corresponding to the earlier enclosure, close to the centre of the graveyard, which suggests the oldest part of the site retains a density of early material that the Victorian landscaping, thorough as it was, did not entirely displace.