The inscription is not decorative; it is a request, worn nearly to nothing by centuries of exposure, asking for a prayer on behalf of someone called Domnall.

The slab was recorded and described by two scholars working decades apart, and their accounts differ slightly in their measurements and emphasis. Harold Leask, writing in 1950, described a piece roughly 1.75 metres long and 0.66 metres wide, its cross formed from an endless interlaced band with a plain circle at the centre, two loops at each terminal, and a single-line border with hollowed angles at the corners. R. A. S. Macalister, whose 1949 volume in the Corpus Inscriptionum Insularum Celticarum catalogued early medieval inscriptions from across Ireland and Britain, recorded the slab as incomplete and rather wider, measuring 1.75 metres by 1.57 metres. He described the cross design as having triquetra ends at its terminals, the triquetra being a three-cornered knotwork motif common in early Christian stone carving. More significantly, Macalister identified an inscription running downward along the dexter, or right-hand, side of the cross. He read it as OROIT AR DOMNALL, an Old Irish formula meaning roughly "a prayer for Domnall". Such memorial inscriptions appear on early medieval slabs across Ireland, typically marking graves or commemorating the person named. Macalister was candid about the difficulty of reading it, noting that it was "much battered and requires prolonged scrutiny to make anything of it at all".

The slab lies near the building known locally as St Kevin's Kitchen, a Romanesque church with a distinctive round tower built into its west end. It is the north side of that structure where the stone can be found recumbent on the ground, its surface now open to the Wicklow weather, the inscription still present for those who know to look for it along the right-hand side of the cross.