The cross cut into its face is not quite what it first appears: the middle of the design has flaked away, the bottom of the cross is left open rather than closed, and the side lines bend outward at right angles before extending all the way to the edges of the stone. The effect is something between a cross and a frame, spare and geometric in a way that feels deliberate rather than accidental.

The slab measures roughly 1.57 metres by 0.6 metres, and the scholar R.A.S. Macalister, writing in 1916 to 1917, placed it among what he called the twelfth-century type of cross-slabs. Cross-slabs of this kind are upright or recumbent stones carved with a cross in low relief, and were widely used across early medieval Ireland as grave markers or devotional objects. Macalister catalogued this example as number 40 in his survey, noting its position near the southern and western walls of the graveyard enclosure. Inis Cealtra itself was an important monastic island, its community of churches and graves built up over centuries of early Christian activity in the west of Ireland.