The figure of Christ is rendered in a style so angular and schematised that it reads less as devotional naturalism and more as something arrived at through an entirely different logic, one in which musculature is expressed as raised angular ribs with faceted planes between them, the stomach as an empty triangle, and the tendons of the neck as parallel geometric ridges. The legs are bent sharply at right angles at the knee, the feet crossing each other diagonally, and the perizonium, the cloth worn around the waist, spreads in flat angular folds before looping into a large knot on the left side. The face, with its open mouth and almond-shaped eyes, carries what the art historian John Hunt described as an intensely dramatic and forceful expression, made stranger still by the loss of the nose, broken away at some point in the past and later replaced, then lost again, leaving only an oblong recess in its place.

The plaque measures 0.84 metres in height and 0.72 metres across, with the figure of Christ projecting roughly 11 centimetres from the surface of the cross in high relief. It is thought to date from the late sixteenth century and is believed to have originally formed part of a memorial. Its origins lie not in Johnstown but approximately three kilometres to the north-north-east, at the abbey of Fertagh, from which it was removed along with other architectural fragments and a baptismal font, all of which were subsequently incorporated into the RC church at Johnstown. The abbey at Fertagh was an Augustinian foundation, and the displacement of carved stonework from dissolved or ruined religious houses into nearby churches was a common enough fate for such objects in post-Reformation Ireland. What makes this piece unusual, as Hunt noted in his 1974 study of Irish medieval figure sculpture, is that it appears to be unique in its type, a singular object without a clear parallel in the surviving record.