Measuring just over a metre and a half in length and less than three-quarters of a metre across at its base, the slab is incomplete; only pieces of the upper section survive, some of them held in place with concrete. A crack runs across the face beneath what is described as a barred knop, the small decorative boss that sits just below the cross-head, and the base of the cross is too worn now to make out its original form. What remains is a three-armed trefoil-headed cross with its shaft carved in false relief, a technique where the form is raised slightly from the surface to create the impression of depth without being fully three-dimensional.

Ringing the border of the slab is an inscription in Roman capitals, and it is those letters that offer the most intriguing thread. Writing in 1903, a scholar named Fitzgerald observed that the use of Roman capitals suggested a seventeenth-century date for the stone. The lettering runs around the edge but is only legible in places. What can be pieced together reads as fragments of a memorial: a figure identified as Butler of Rathoon, described with the Latin word generosus, meaning a gentleman or man of good family, and beside him a woman named Helena Butler, identified as his wife, with the word obyt, meaning "he or she died", trailing off into illegibility. The Butler family were one of the great Anglo-Norman dynasties of Munster, and Rathoon appears to place this particular branch in the Tipperary region. Beyond that, the stone keeps its own counsel.