It is a cross-slab, roughly a metre long and tapering towards the base, incised on one broad face with a cross-of-arcs, a design in which the arms of the cross are formed by curved rather than straight lines, set within a circle. The carving is about 29 centimetres across. The stone is damaged: a portion of the top is missing, there is spalling that cuts into the upper part of the cross, and a crack runs roughly vertically down the right-hand side of the carved face. None of that damage is new. What makes the object quietly strange is not its condition but its displacement. It does not belong to Kilkenny at all.

The slab originated in County Wexford, where it stood on a small, low mound, roughly three metres across and only about thirty centimetres high, approximately eighty metres south-east of Clone church. Early medieval cross-slabs like this one were typically used as grave markers or devotional stones, often associated with early church sites. When the antiquarian and artist George Victor Du Noyer recorded it sometime between 1864 and 1866, sketching it for what became part of the Royal Irish Academy's collection of his field drawings, the stone was still in place on the mound and its carved face was oriented west. At some point after that, it was moved, eventually ending up in the OPW depot in Kilkenny, where it is catalogued under the depot stone carving number KD047. The reasons for its removal from the mound are not recorded, but the journey from a low field mound beside a Wexford church to a Kilkenny storage facility is considerable, and the stone carries no obvious explanation for how it got there.