The slab is only a metre tall, tapering from a modest base to a flat top, but its west face carries a layered design that speaks to considerable craft: an outline circle, inside which sits an equal-armed cross with broadly hollowed angles, and centred within that again a Latin cross whose shaft pushes down beyond the circle's boundary, widening into a triangular expansion at the base and finishing at the top with a gently curving bar-terminal. It is the kind of object that looks simple from a distance and increasingly deliberate the longer you look.

The slab forms part of a wider monastic enclosure at Cill Rialaigh, a site enclosed by a substantial cashel wall, the term for a stone ringfort or enclosure, which contains an oratory, a circular hut, three rectangular buildings, and a covered passage. Just outside the enclosure to the north sits a rectangular platform holding a leacht, a low commemorative cairn associated with early Christian practice, and a second cross-slab. The site continued in use as a ceallúnach, an informal burial ground typically associated with unbaptised infants or the unregistered poor, right into the nineteenth century, which gives some sense of how long this elevated, exposed place retained meaning for the communities below it. A holy well lies roughly ninety metres to the south-west, a common feature in early ecclesiastical landscapes where water sources carried ritual and practical importance in equal measure. The whole complex looks out over the mouth of Kenmare Bay towards the Beara Peninsula, a location that feels chosen rather than accidental.