Every other inscribed stone on the island carries a cross. This one does not. Lying broken in three large pieces, with several smaller fragments now missing, it bears only a short line of text cut along its length, and that text is itself incomplete: OR DO MACCU, a fragment of an Old Irish commemorative formula that would ordinarily read something like "a prayer for" the named individual, whose identity has been lost with the missing stone.

The slab sits within the Saint's graveyard, a few metres from the wall of Teampul na bhFear nGonta, a church whose name translates roughly as "the church of the wounded men". The stone itself measures just under one and a half metres long and roughly half a metre wide, and is only six centimetres thick, which may partly explain why it has fractured. The scholar R.A.S. Macalister, writing in 1916 to 1917, identified it as twelfth-century in type, placing it within a period of considerable ecclesiastical activity across Ireland, when earlier monastic sites were being consolidated and reformed. What makes the absence of a cross particularly curious is that it appears deliberate rather than accidental; the incised inscription occupies the full long axis of the surviving middle piece, and there is no obvious space where a cross formula might once have been. Whether the mason simply omitted it, or whether the convention meant something different for this particular burial, is not recorded anywhere.