It is not large, measuring just over a metre in length and tapering towards its base, and at first glance it might read as plain early medieval stonework. Look more closely, though, and the carving resolves into something considered and deliberate: a ringed cross, that is an equal-armed cross enclosed within a circular ring, set upon a gently tapering shaft, with small hollowed angles at the junctions of the arms and a single incised circle where arm meets shaft. The geometry is careful, the sandstone worn but legible.

Cross-slabs of this type are among the more common survivals of early Christian Ireland, used as grave markers or devotional objects within monastic enclosures, though no two are quite the same in their proportions or decorative choices. What makes this particular example quietly interesting is what has been lost from it. The scholar R.A.S. Macalister, writing in 1949, recorded a worn inscription on the slab, presumably a name or a prayer in Latin or possibly ogham, the early Irish script carved in strokes along a central line. By the time the slab was examined for the archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula, published by Cork University Press in 1996, that inscription had become entirely illegible. Whatever name or dedication was once cut into the stone has since faded beyond recovery, leaving only the cross-form itself as evidence of whoever commissioned or carved it.

Church Island sits in Lough Currane near Waterville, and the site retains the remains of a small oratory and enclosure associated with the early medieval monastic tradition of the Kerry coastline. The slab is now kept inside the church building, which offers it some protection from the elements that have already claimed its inscription.