The slab, roughly 1.9 metres long and tapering to a wedge shape as coffin-tomb lids typically did, carries a foliated cross carved in low relief, its arms and terminals flowering into trefoils in the manner associated with Anglo-Norman funerary stonework. So far, fairly conventional for its type. What is unusual are two additional arms that rise diagonally from the shaft of the cross, below the horizontal arms, each one also ending in a trefoil. No simple decorative whim, these diagonal extensions may have been carved deliberately to evoke the position of Christ's outstretched arms on the cross, embedding a figurative meaning within what might otherwise read as pure ornament.

The foliated or bottonée cross, a design in which the terminals branch into leaf-like lobes, was closely associated with the Anglo-Norman settlers who arrived in Ireland from the late twelfth century onward, bringing with them their own funerary conventions and stonemason traditions. Comparable examples have been identified at Bannow in County Wexford and at the Dominican friary in Kilkenny, and the stylistic parallels point to a thirteenth-century date for the Strade slab. The friary itself was founded in the thirteenth century, so the slab fits comfortably within that early phase of the community's life. That it survives fully intact, its surface still legible after some eight hundred years, makes it a relatively rare example of this kind of carving in the west of Ireland.