It is a leacht, a type of commemorative or devotional monument found at early Christian sites across Ireland, typically consisting of a low platform of carefully laid slabs, sometimes topped with a cross or pillar, and used as a focus for prayer or remembrance. This one is modest in scale, roughly two metres by one and three-quarter metres and standing only about thirty centimetres high, but at its centre rises something more arresting: a broad pillar of purple sandstone, one and a half metres tall, planted at the platform's heart with quiet authority.

The sandstone pillar itself is the detail that lingers. Purple sandstone is a distinctive material, and the choice, whether deliberate or simply practical given local geology, gives the monument an unusual visual character. The platform's slab construction is characteristic of early Christian leachta found throughout the Iveragh peninsula, where island and coastal sites preserving traces of early monasticism are relatively concentrated. Church Island itself sits within this wider landscape of early medieval religious activity along the south Kerry coastline, a region where the physical remains of small monastic communities have survived in various states of completeness. The leacht's position close to the church wall suggests it functioned within an organised devotional or commemorative space rather than as an isolated feature.