Pilgrims rubbed it. They read a Latin inscription asking them to pray for a man named Berechtuine, and apparently they obliged, generation after generation, until the spiral medallions decorating the corners of the cross were nearly effaced. That inscription, translated roughly as "Christ. Whoever will have read this inscription, let him pray for Berechtuine", makes St Berichter's Stone one of the relatively rare Early Christian cross-slabs in Ireland to carry a legible dedicatory text. Its decoration, described by the scholar Peter Harbison in 1977 as possibly the finest on any Early Christian cross-slab, has been compared to the artwork in the Lindisfarne Gospels, that celebrated Northumbrian manuscript of the late seventh or early eighth century. The parallel is not fanciful: the bold diagonal fret, the key pattern, the wreath of interlace around the central boss, and the lobe-ended spirals at the cross terminals all belong to the same visual world.

The slab is dated by Henderson and Okasha, who published the definitive study of the group in 1992, to the mid-eighth century. It is far from alone. The chancel walls and floor of the church contain or display more than a dozen further fragments, ranging from pieces with interlace plaitwork and step-pattern ornament to small slabs with partial Latin inscriptions whose texts are now irrecoverable. Several of these fragments, including one bearing what may be a figure of Christ crucified with a rayed nimbus, cut crudely beside an unfinished six-petalled marigold cross, are dated to the late eighth or ninth century. That particular slab, irregularly shaped and measuring 96 by 35 centimetres, was found standing upright at the east end of the chancel before being disinterred by Dúchas in 1993; scholars have suggested it may have served as a shrine panel or altar frontal, or perhaps as a teaching piece. Stones b, c, and d from the sequence, along with fragments h through l, are now held by the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin, though concrete casts of the first three have been mounted on the chancel's south wall. One further effigy, inscribed BERICHEART and worn in the same way as the great stone, is described by the antiquary Reeves in 1858 as having been cut in Charleville around 1830, which gives some sense of how actively the devotional life of this place continued well into the nineteenth century.