The slab itself tapers to a rounded point at one end, and the cross above this unusual plinth is incised rather than raised, its angles hollowed out where the arms meet the shaft.

The island is Inis Cealtra, sometimes called Holy Island, and it carries one of the more concentrated clusters of early medieval ecclesiastical remains in the west of Ireland. This particular slab, measuring just over a metre in height and nearly half a metre thick, was recorded by the scholar R. A. S. Macalister in 1916 and 1917, who placed it in the twelfth-century tradition of Irish cross-slab carving. A more detailed examination by Okasha and Forsyth, published in 2001, drew attention to the inscription running in two horizontal lines across the top of the cross. The text is incomplete, but reading the lower line first, as the layout seems to demand, it resolves into the Old Irish phrase 'do Máel Sechnaill', meaning something close to 'for' or 'of Máel Sechnaill'. Máel Sechnaill was a common name among the Irish aristocracy and ecclesiastical community of the period, and without further context the individual commemorated here cannot be identified with certainty. What the inscription does confirm is that the slab was made to mark a specific person, not simply to decorate a sacred space, and that whoever carved it combined a formula of commemoration with a design that departed noticeably from the standard forms of its time.