On its western side, a ringed cross, the form sometimes called a Celtic cross in popular usage, spreads across almost the full width of the stone in low relief. Turn to the eastern face and the cross there is a rougher thing entirely, formed not by careful carving but by hacking away the stone at the angles to leave the shape projecting outward. The slab is 1.7 metres tall and nearly a metre wide, substantial enough to dominate the modest space around it, though its shaft continues below the present ground level, and the top is broken off, so whatever it once looked like in full, that version is gone.

The stone stands to the north-east of an early medieval church, and for some period of its existence it was not standing at all. When archaeologist Rose Cleary excavated its base in 1995, the same year the National Monuments Service re-set it upright, she found plough marks on the surface. The implication is that the slab had spent time lying flat in a nearby field, likely turned over by agricultural work across the centuries before anyone thought to retrieve it. The cross on the eastern face caught her attention for another reason too. It closely resembles a cross incised on the back of a nearby gravestone, and Cleary raised the possibility that it was not an early Christian carving at all, but something added later by local hands, what she called folk art rather than an original early medieval motif. The western ringed cross, recorded as early as 1912 by H. S. Crawford, carries no such ambiguity in the literature, though the broken terminal at the top is a reminder that even the more confident of the two designs is incomplete.