St Finden's high cross bears no figural carving, no interlace, none of the elaborate iconography that draws visitors to better-known examples elsewhere in Ireland. Its only ornament consists of sunken panels on the sides of the shaft and on the underside of the ring and arms, a restraint that sets it apart from most surviving Irish high crosses.

The site's origins reach back, at least by repute, to the sixth century, when St Finnian of Clonard is said to have founded a monastery here. The Romanesque church that still stands within the graveyard is a later development; Romanesque architecture in Ireland generally dates from the twelfth century, brought in during a period of ecclesiastical reform and Continental influence. The curvilinear shape of the boundary wall is thought to follow the line of a much older Early Christian ecclesiastical enclosure, the kind of roughly circular or oval precinct that typically defined monastic settlements of the early medieval period. The graveyard also holds two baptismal fonts, with a possible third recorded as far back as 1883, along with a tapering granite graveslab incised with a Latin cross on its east face. An early wedge-shaped cross-slab, noted by Crawford in 1925 as bearing a Greek cross in a circle on one side and a human face on the other, had not been located as of 2011. More recently, twelve additional cross slabs, two cross bases, architectural fragments, and two fragments of a millstone were identified on site. In 1944, the state issued National Monument Order No. 8 for Aghowle, specifically prohibiting further burial of human remains within and around the area of the Romanesque church.

About 100 metres to the south-east of the graveyard sits a granite bullaun stone with four basins, set into the ground. Bullaun stones, which are boulders or slabs with one or more cup-shaped depressions ground into them, are found across Ireland and are commonly associated with early ecclesiastical sites, though their precise function remains a matter of discussion. This one, with four separate basins, is an unusually complete example to find so close to a site already dense with early medieval stonework.