This is a leacht, a type of early Christian commemorative cairn or prayer station, typically associated with a named holy person and used as a focus for ritual or remembrance. At the eastern end of this one stands a carved slab that complicates whatever tidy story you might have been telling yourself about the site.

The cross-slab is 1.1 metres high and 0.3 metres wide. Carved into its western face is an equal-armed cross enclosed within a circle, with the head of the cross extending at least five centimetres beyond the circle's edge and the side arms flaring slightly where they meet it. Below the cross, there is further ornament that does not resolve into any recognisable pattern. Lower still, barely legible now, is an inscription written in half-uncial script, the rounded, carefully formed lettering associated with early medieval monastic manuscripts. The scholar R. A. S. Macalister, writing in 1949, read the inscription as COLUM MAC DINET. The first word can still be made out, but the rest has faded badly. MAC is possible but uncertain; the name that follows it, possibly Dinet, is nearly gone, with individual letters open to more than one reading. Whether this records a person buried here, commemorated here, or connected to the site in some other way is not settled. The name, if it is one, does not correspond to any well-documented historical figure, which makes the slab neither more nor less interesting, only more honest about what early medieval commemoration usually looked like: local, particular, and largely unrecorded beyond the stone itself.

The leacht and its slab sit within a large stone-walled enclosure on the lower north-western slopes of Lateevemore, overlooking the broad curve of land around Smerwick Harbour. Because the oratory draws the eye and the crowds, the leacht tends to go unexamined. The inscription is extremely faint and requires good light and some patience; the west face of the slab, where both the cross and the lettering appear, is the side worth spending time with.