The slab, just over two metres long and tapering from roughly half a metre wide at the top to a narrower base, has been broken in two horizontally, the fracture running just below the knop, a small decorative boss where the cross-head meets the shaft. Despite that damage, the carved detail is still legible: an incised cross whose four arms end in fleur-de-lis terminals and whose centre is marked by a lozenge. The whole cross-head is enclosed within a double-lined quatrefoil, a four-lobed geometric frame, with a triple curving motif pushing inward at each of its indentations. The shaft descends to a simple stepped base. There is no inscription, and if there was ever one, no trace survives.

The church that now houses it is a nineteenth-century Church of Ireland building, but it was raised on the chancel of the much earlier medieval church of St Mary's, which dates to the thirteenth century. The graveslab itself is placed stylistically in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, a period when Gowran was a place of some consequence in the medieval diocese of Ossory. The design is not a one-off: another slab of very similar character exists elsewhere in the same church, which suggests either a shared workshop tradition or a community wealthy enough to commission matched commemorative stonework. The chamfered edges, the concentric knop, the enclosed quatrefoil with its projecting motifs, all of these are the marks of a carver working within a recognisable decorative vocabulary of the period, even if the person commemorated has been lost to time.