On one face, a Latin cross with an expanded base and squared terminals at the head and arms has been carved with careful, outlined grooves. Along the narrow edges of the same stone runs an ogham inscription, the early medieval Irish script that uses a series of notches and strokes cut along a central stemline, typically used to record personal names and ancestry. The two systems of marking sit on the same piece of stone but face in opposite directions, and scholars have long noted that neither was made with the other in mind.

The inscription reads DUG(E or U)NNGG[I] MAQI RODDOS, a formula meaning roughly "[personal name], son of Roddos", though most of the vowels have weathered badly and the M of MAQI is now below ground level. In 1848, the antiquarian John Windele recorded a local tradition that the stone had originally stood near a well somewhere up the mountain to the east of Ballynahunt, suggesting a significance tied to a sacred water source before it was ever moved. It was later found in a trench or drain roughly 20 to 30 metres south-east of its current position before being fixed to the farmhouse wall, where a metal clamp holding it in place has since damaged the left arm of the cross. R. A. S. Macalister, writing in 1945, observed that the cross occupies what was the original butt end of the stone, meaning it was carved upside-down relative to the ogham text and is certainly the later addition of the two, a detail which points to a stone first raised in the early centuries of the first millennium and then reworked, perhaps repurposed, as Christianity took hold in the region.