Four oarsmen pull at the oars, a fifth figure steers from the stern, and the vessel moves through a sea rendered not as waves but as a field of crosses. It is one of the oldest known representations of a boat in Irish stone carving, and it sits quietly in a burial ground within an early ecclesiastical enclosure at Kilnaruane, near Bantry in west Cork, still upright after more than a thousand years.

The stone stands just over two metres tall and is carved on both its main faces. The southwest face is divided into four panels reading downward: ribbon interlace at the top, then a praying figure in the traditional early Christian orant posture, arms raised, then a Greek cross, and at the base a scene identified as St Paul and St Anthony seated at a pedestal table sharing bread, a scene drawn from the desert fathers tradition that was influential in early Irish monasticism. The northeast face carries three panels of its own: fragmentary spiral interlace at the top, then two pairs of four-legged animals, and then the boat scene below. Incisions cut into the very top of the pillar suggest that an additional element was once fixed there, now lost. Nearby, four deeply grooved boulders may have served as hinge or cornerstones for some kind of associated structure, though what that structure was remains uncertain. The stone and its context were examined in detail by Hourihane and Hourihane in 1979.

The boat panel is the detail that stops most people. The crosses filling the water around the vessel have been read variously as a stylised rendering of waves and as a deliberate theological image, the journey of the soul through a sacred sea. Whether the carver intended one reading or both is a question the stone does not answer.