That distance matters, because the stone itself carries the kind of detail that rewards close attention: two faces, each carved with a Latin cross, each worked in a subtly different hand or tradition, and together suggesting a craftsman thinking carefully about how geometry and symbol might reinforce one another.

The slab's original home was Inchcleraun Island on Lough Ree, Co. Longford, where it stood between two early medieval church sites known as Templedermot and Templemore, part of a monastic complex with a long history of early Christian activity. Francis Joseph Bigger noted it there in 1900, recording its position within that ecclesiastical landscape. The stone is a round-topped, subrectangular pillar of grey limestone, and on its principal face the carving is unusually composed: a single-lined Latin cross sits inside a second incised cross whose arms meet at stepped angles with rectangular terminals, a design that gives the whole composition a deliberate, almost architectural quality. A border runs along the shaft, and near the head of the cross this border seems to resolve into a spiral motif that scholars have read as resembling the curved head of a crosier, the hooked staff associated with abbots and bishops. Two small incised circles occupy the spaces between the arms of the cross head. The reverse face is quieter, a single-line Latin cross with rounded arm junctions, though there is a faint possibility that it once formed a ringed cross with quadrants shaped like thistles or bells, the kind of form common in early Irish stone carving where the circle binding the arms carries its own symbolic weight. Researchers including Macalister, English, and Ciuchini have each returned to this stone, and its modest dimensions have not discouraged sustained scholarly attention.