The inscription reads MAEL-CHOLUIM, a personal name recorded by the scholar R.A.S. Macalister in his 1949 corpus of Irish inscriptions. The slab is one of five early medieval cross-slabs now mounted together on the west face of a purpose-built display structure set along the line of the east gable of the original church, a deliberate arrangement that gathers what might otherwise be scattered or lost.

The slab itself measures roughly 83 centimetres high, 52 centimetres wide, and 12 centimetres thick. Carved into its face is a ringed cross, the kind familiar from early medieval Ireland in which a ring connects the arms, with expanded terminals rendered in false relief, a technique in which the design is made to appear raised by cutting the surrounding surface slightly lower rather than by carving the motif proud of the stone. The head of the cross may originally have sat within a fully circular setting, which would place it among a recognised type found at monastic sites across the country. The name Mael-Choluim, meaning devotee of Colum, points to the cult of Saint Columba and suggests the stone marked a grave or commemorated a person of some standing within an early Christian community. Cross-slabs of this type generally date to the early medieval period, broadly spanning the sixth to the twelfth centuries, and were used both as grave markers and as devotional objects within ecclesiastical enclosures.