When the art historian Françoise Henry visited the Inishkeas in the 1930s, she found it standing upright on a slight rise south of the harbour, positioned between the houses and the sea, and measured it at roughly 1.6 metres high and just over a metre wide. At that point it was still complete, and her photograph showed something worth travelling to see: a roughly rectangular slab, broad-shouldered at the top and tapering to a point at the base, its upper face dominated by a cross formed of arcs enclosed within a triple-line circle nearly a metre in diameter. Paired spirals rose from the outermost ring on either side, and below the circle descended an elaborate cruciform shaft of spirals and frets, asymmetrical in its elements, with two opposing spirals at its foot.

The carving belongs to a tradition of early medieval incised cross-slabs found widely across Ireland, in which a cross-in-circle, sometimes called a ringed cross, is cut directly into a flat stone rather than worked in relief. The decorative vocabulary here, concentric rings, spiral ornament, interlace-like frets, is characteristic of early Christian stone carving in the west of Ireland, where the Inishkeas were home to a monastic settlement of some significance. Henry's 1937 publication recorded the slab in its intact state; at some point after that visit the stone fell, and the upper half shattered. The damage was severe. The cross-in-circle that once filled the upper face is now largely destroyed, and what survives of the lower shaft is weathered and requires some patience to read.