What makes it quietly compelling is not its size but its double life: both faces carry carved crosses, each different in character, as though the mason or the community felt a single inscription was insufficient.

On its north-east face, the slab bears an encircled outline cross, a form in which the arms of the cross are contained within a ring, common in early medieval Irish monastic carving. Beneath this is a horizontally disposed, elongated outline rectangle whose purpose is not recorded. Beneath the carved imagery, the same face shows a field of vertical grooves that run through the stone, which might easily be mistaken for deliberate ornament; they are, in fact, entirely natural. The opposite face is simpler: a plain linear Latin cross, unadorned. The slab measures 0.74 metres in height, 0.34 metres in width, and just 0.08 metres in thickness, dimensions that underline how modest an object it is relative to the vast oceanic setting around it. The monastery on Sceilg Mhichíl, constructed by early Christian monks on a near-vertical Atlantic rock some twelve kilometres off the Iveragh Peninsula, was in use from at least the sixth or seventh century, and the graveyard beside which this slab stands was the community's place of burial throughout that long occupation.

The slab sits close to the south-western boundary of the graveyard, which itself occupies one of the monastery's lower terraces. Visitors to the island, which is accessible only by licensed boat during the summer months and subject to strict visitor numbers, pass through this area on the standard route around the monastic complex. The graveyard contains several cross-slabs and grave markers, and this one, unremarkable at a glance, repays a closer look at both faces.