What makes it quietly arresting is the detail of its construction: the angles of the cross are hollowed out rather than left square or rounded, and every face has been dressed to a smooth finish. For a slab of stone averaging less than twenty centimetres in thickness and reaching a maximum width of just under half a metre, it has a spare, almost severe presence.

The graveyard surrounding the cross is a large rectangular enclosure, and it may preserve the outline of an Early Christian foundation associated with a figure named Aighne, from whom the Irish placename Cill Aighne, meaning the church of Aighne, is derived. Early Christian ecclesiastical sites in Ireland frequently developed around the memory of a local saint or founder, and the rectangular form of the enclosure is itself a feature sometimes associated with such origins. The cross, catalogued during the Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey published by J. Cuppage in 1986, stands within this longer continuity of sacred use, though precisely when the cross itself was made is not recorded in the available sources.