The stone is roughly rectangular, tapering toward a near-triangular apex, and measures just over three-quarters of a metre high. The carving is naïve in style and executed in low relief, the kind of work that signals not lack of skill so much as a particular set of circumstances.

What the carver chose to include, and what to leave out, tells its own story. The shaft of the cross is absent entirely, concealed behind Christ's body or simply not attempted. The horizontal bar is there, and the arms hang across it in a pronounced V-shape, each palm marked by a nail hole. The head is the most confident part of the composition: oval-faced, erect with a faint tilt to the right, ringed by short radiating grooves that may represent waves of hair or the crown of thorns. The beard is rendered in fine parallel lines, notably without a moustache, and the face is reduced to round eyes, a long straight nose, and a single horizontal groove for a mouth. The feet, placed side by side rather than overlapping in the more familiar overlapping convention, reach the very base of the slab, and the toes and the foot-nail are unclear, possibly because the stone is incomplete at that point. The Penal Era, roughly spanning the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is the period suggested by this style of carving. During that time, when Catholic worship in Ireland was outlawed or severely restricted, religious imagery was often produced outside formal ecclesiastical channels, by local craftspeople working with limited materials and in difficult conditions. The rough-dressed surface and spare composition of this slab fit that context well.

The friary at Ballyhaunis, in Co. Mayo, is still an active Augustinian site, and the plaque is housed in a side porch of the church rather than displayed in any formal way. It sits close at hand, easy to miss if you are not looking for it.