The slab is 1.58 metres high, tapering to a pointed top, and the care taken in its execution is still legible after many centuries. The western face carries a Latin cross with square terminals rising from a triangular base, its arms and shaft meeting at a small incised square that functions almost like a signature or a seal. Turn the slab around, and the opposite face bears a simpler equal-armed linear cross, 0.7 metres high, more austere in design but no less deliberate.

The island's name, Inse Fhearann Na Gcléireach, translates roughly as the island of the clerics' land, which tells you something about who once occupied or claimed this place. Cross-slabs of this kind are associated with early Christian activity in Ireland, typically dating from somewhere between the sixth and twelfth centuries, and they were used to mark sacred ground, burial sites, or the territories of monastic communities. The dual-faced arrangement here is relatively unusual; most surviving examples carry carving on one face only. The Latin cross with square terminals is a form found across early medieval Irish ecclesiastical sites, while the equal-armed cross on the reverse belongs to an older, simpler graphic vocabulary. That both appear on a single stone, on an island whose very name invokes the clergy, suggests a site of some local religious significance, even if the precise history of that community has not survived in the written record.