The slab is incomplete; the other portion is believed to remain in the ground where it was first turned up during grave-digging, making what survives above ground literally half a memorial. What draws attention is not its size, roughly 0.86 metres wide and 1.14 metres long in its present state, but the tension between its ornamental ambition and its current condition. A broad band of scroll foliage, possibly branching from the stem of a cross, fills the central panel, with plainer spaces to either side. In one of those flanking spaces there was once an inscription. It is now obliterated, worn away to nothing, legible only because earlier scholars caught it in time.

The inscription was recorded and puzzled over by R. A. S. Macalister in his 1949 Corpus Inscriptionum Insularum Celticarum, where he transcribed it as a prayer formula: "Or do Muirchertach U Chathalain ocus do Gutnodar, aw. i. Do Thigerna U Fogartaig." The phrase "or do" is a standard medieval Irish memorial formula meaning "a prayer for", the kind of invocation found on commemorative slabs across early Christian Ireland. Macalister proposed that the Muirchertach named here may be the same Muirchertach ua Cathalain, lord of Uí Fogartaig, recorded in the Annals of the Four Masters as having been slain at the battle of Móin Mór in 1151, a large engagement in Munster with wide political consequences. The second name, Gutnodar, remains unidentified; neither Macalister nor Harold Leask, who described the slab in 1950, could place him. The stone commemorates two people, then, one of whom has left no other trace in the record.

The slab was part of a visitor centre exhibition display at Glendalough as of 2005, and a 3D model of it has been produced by the Discovery Programme, making the surface detail accessible in a way the worn stone itself no longer permits.