Measuring just over a metre above ground and half a metre wide, it was set into the earth upside down and pressed into service as a headstone, which means that whoever once lay beneath its original decorative face has been effectively turned on their head by history. The left edge of the slab is missing, and there is no inscription to identify who it was made for or when.

The decoration that remains is carved in two distinct registers of confidence. A cross-shaft runs down the face, deeply and deliberately incised, suggesting a carver who knew the form well. Below it, a cross-base of triangular shape is cut far more crudely, ending roughly seventeen centimetres above the broken foot of the stone, as though the work was either rushed or left unfinished. The slab sits on or near the site of a former Cistercian abbey at Inishlounaght, a house of that austere twelfth-century order whose members built in plain stone and kept ornament to a minimum. Cistercian graveslabs, grave-markers cut from local stone and decorated with crosses rather than effigies or lettering, are found across Irish monastic sites, and this one appears to have been drawn back into use by a later community that valued the stone more than whatever memory it originally carried.