The eastern face is smoothly dressed and bears a two-line outline cross whose head is encircled by a single ring, a form sometimes called a ringed or wheel cross. Its shaft rises from a rectangular base, and the whole composition is framed by a groove that curls at the bottom into simple scrolls, each containing a small recessed roundel. The upper corners of the slab carry angular grooves ending in bifid, or forked, terminals that frame further roundels. It is a design of some refinement and evident deliberateness. Turn the slab around, so to speak, and the western face is altogether rougher in its dressing and plainer in its ornament: a Latin cross with open-ended terminals, its grooves still showing the traces of pocking, the repetitive pecking technique used to cut the design into the stone before it was smoothed.

Cross-slabs of this kind are characteristic of early medieval Irish monasticism, when communities of monks marked sacred ground with inscribed stones rather than built monuments. Church Island sits in Lough Currane on the Iveragh Peninsula in south Kerry, a landscape that supported a number of such island hermitages and monastic enclosures from roughly the sixth century onwards. The fact that the carvers treated the two faces so differently raises quiet questions about sequence and intention: whether one face is earlier, whether different hands were at work, or whether the contrast between polished and rough was itself meaningful within the ritual life of the site. The slab stands a short distance from the south-west corner of the church, close enough to suggest a deliberate relationship with the building but not embedded within it.