It is not lying flat in the earth as gravestones usually do, and it never was; this is a commissioned memorial slab, made to be seen, and the person who ordered it made sure to say so in stone.

The slab is trapezoidal, broadest at the top, and carved in false relief, a technique where the background is cut away to leave the design standing slightly proud of the surface. Dominating it is a shafted cross whose arms extend the full width of the stone and whose shaft runs almost its entire length; where the arms and shaft meet, the crossing is enclosed within a circle, a form associated with early Christian and later medieval Irish stonework. The terminals of both arms and shaft are expanded outward, giving the design a clean, deliberate finish. Flanking the shaft on one side is the Christogram IHS, rendered decoratively, and on the other a Latin inscription in two vertical lines that reads: IOHANNES O MMNILA ME FIERI FECIT 1618. The phrase me fieri fecit, meaning roughly "had me made" or "caused me to be made", was a standard formula in memorial Latin, placing the patron's name on record as the person who commissioned the work. Iohannes O Mmnila, whoever he was, wanted credit, or perhaps simply permanence, and in 1618, on the eve of the profound disruptions that would follow the Flight of the Earls, he paid a carver to give it to him.