Finely dressed on its inscribed face, it bears a ringed outline cross with a tapering shaft, an equal-armed cross with expanded terminals near the top, and the Greek-derived contractions IHS and XPS on the left and right arms respectively, each marked with a horizontal stroke to signal their abbreviated nature. These are contractions of Iesous and Christos. Below and above the transom, debased forms of the Greek letters alpha and omega appear, the traditional symbols of beginning and end. Running vertically down the shaft and continuing along its right side is an inscription read by the scholar R. A. S. Macalister in 1949 as BENNACHT F(or) ANMAIN ANMCHADA, meaning roughly "a blessing on the soul of Anmchad."

The slab sits at the south-west corner of a leacht, a low cairn-like stone monument associated with early Christian devotional practice, on Church Island in Lough Currane. Its current position is not ancient, at least not definitively so. Photographs taken by Lord Dunraven in 1875 do not show it standing here, and it was most likely placed in this spot during works carried out by the Office of Public Works in 1883. The person it may commemorate is more firmly rooted in the historical record. The scholar John Sheehan has proposed that the inscription refers to Anmchad Ua Dúnchada, whom the Annals of Inisfallen describe as an "anchorite of God," a religious hermit living apart from ordinary monastic life, who was buried on a place called Inis Ausail in 1058. If the identification holds, the slab connects a carved piece of purplish stone to a named individual from eleventh-century Kerry, one whose death was thought worth recording in a major medieval chronicle.