What it does carry is a carefully carved ringed cross, the kind where a circle connects the arms, with bifid terminals, meaning each arm ends in a forked or split point, and four additional arms projecting diagonally from the angles, each one finishing in an expanded terminal of its own. Below the cross-head, the shaft descends to rest on a stepped calvary mount, the tiered base traditionally evoking Golgotha. On the left-hand side of the shaft, a raised rectangular block sits between the shaft and the outer margin, its purpose now unclear. The margin itself, a plain raised border running around the full perimeter of the slab, survives at between nine and fourteen centimetres wide. The slab measures just under a metre across at its widest point, though its full length was not recorded.

The wear on the stone makes precise dating impossible from the carving alone, but the style is not without parallel. The slab closely resembles the O'Donill/White graveslab, another stone associated with St. Mary's, which was erected in 1592. That date places both slabs in the late sixteenth century, a period when this kind of elaborate funerary carving, drawing on older medieval cross forms while incorporating Renaissance decorative details, was fashionable among the better-off families of Munster and the southern midlands. The Burgagery-Lands townland name itself points to a medieval past; burgage tenure was a form of landholding associated with medieval towns and their margins, suggesting the area around St. Mary's had long been a place of some administrative and ecclesiastical significance.

The slab lies east of the vestry, roughly sixteen metres from the building's south-east angle. It is prostrate, meaning it lies flat on the ground rather than standing upright, which is the more common condition for slabs of this age that have not been moved indoors or otherwise protected. Visitors who know to look for it, and who crouch down to read the carving at a low angle in raking light, will find the cross design considerably more legible than a straight-on glance suggests.