The practical consequence is that whatever carving occupies its upper portion remains face-down against the earth, unseen. What is visible on the slab's exposed face is arresting enough to make the buried section a genuine source of curiosity.

The slab is one of four in the graveyard, located about thirty metres to the north-east of the Cistercian abbey around which the site grew. Cistercian monasteries, introduced to Ireland in the twelfth century, were typically associated with skilled stone-carving workshops, and this slab reflects that tradition. Tapering in the manner common to medieval memorial stones, it measures 1.46 metres in height, with a base width of half a metre narrowing to 0.37 metres at the top. The east-south-east face carries a worn but still legible composition of four-legged animals whose interlaced or foliated tails cross at the centre of the slab to form an X-shaped pattern. At what is currently the top of the stone, given its inverted position, a further animal is carved with its head turned backwards and its jaws open wide, teeth showing. This kind of backward-glancing beast appears in Romanesque and Insular decorative traditions, where animals with writhing, interlocking bodies were a standard vocabulary of ornament rather than straightforward representation. Curving bands with foliage patterns are faintly discernible elsewhere on the surface, though weathering has reduced them. The entire scheme of decoration sits within a border of nailhead ornament, a motif formed by repeated small pyramid-shaped projections, while a narrow roll moulding, a rounded projecting ridge, defines the edges of the slab.

The carving is worn, and the section of the slab that would ordinarily be read as the upper portion is hidden underground. Visitors looking closely at the exposed face, particularly in low raking light that emphasises surface relief, will have the best chance of making out the animal figures and the foliate bands that frame them.