Known locally as an leac chaol, meaning simply "the narrow slab", it occupies the north-west corner of a leacht, which is a low cairn or platform of stones associated with early Christian devotional practice, often used as a focus for prayer or commemoration at monastic and pilgrimage sites.

The slab's west face has been dressed smooth, and on it an outline Latin cross is incised with noticeably expanded arms and an elongated upper shaft. Below the arms of the cross appear versions of the Greek letters alpha and omega, symbols drawn from the Book of Revelation signifying Christ as the beginning and end of all things, and two small dots sit beneath the base of the shaft. The precision of the work prompted Françoise Henry, writing in 1948, to argue that the design was modelled on seventh-century manuscript illustrations, placing it within the tradition of the great insular gospel books produced in Ireland and Britain during the early medieval period. A later suggestion, put forward by Sheehan in 1990, proposed instead that metal altar-crosses of Coptic type, originating in the Christian communities of Egypt and North Africa, may have provided the template. The two proposals are not necessarily incompatible; manuscripts and metalwork moved along the same routes of ecclesiastical exchange, and a craftsman working on the Iveragh Peninsula could plausibly have encountered either. What both readings agree on is that this small, quietly refined stone was not made in isolation but connects to a much wider world of early Christian visual culture.