The front bears a Latin cross in low relief with double square hollows cut into the angles between the arms, neat and deliberate in its geometry. Turn it over and the reverse tells a slightly different story: a surface pocked all over, with an outlined Latin cross worked into the rough texture. Two treatments, two hands perhaps, or two moments in time, on a piece of stone barely two thirds of a metre long.

The slab sits within St. Berrihert's Kyle, an early ecclesiastical enclosure near Ardane in the Glen of Aherlow. The site is associated with Saint Berrihert, an Anglo-Saxon saint who is said to have settled in Ireland, and the Kyle preserves a remarkable collection of early medieval cross-slabs, the kind of inscribed or carved stones that served as grave markers or devotional objects in early Irish Christianity. The oval stone enclosure that now houses many of these slabs, including this one, was constructed in 1946 by the Office of Public Works, an intervention intended to gather and protect the stones rather than leave them scattered across the site. The cross-slab described here was catalogued by scholar Pádraic Ó hÉailidhe in 1967, who gave it the designation 8A/8B, reflecting its two distinct carved faces.