In 1840, the first Ordnance Survey map placed it roughly 45 metres west of the island's abbey. By the time of the original Clare Island Survey conducted between 1909 and 1911, it had been built into the southern boundary wall of the National School next door, a school erected in 1887. Photographs taken around 1910 show its decorated face pointing south. At some point after that it was moved again, probably to make way for the construction of a bell cot near its earlier position, and by 1952 it was standing where it is today, 16 metres east of the abbey in the eastern part of the graveyard.

Known in Irish as 'Stáca na Cille', the pillar is a substantial object: 2.65 metres tall, narrow in section, with parallel sides and a distinctively angled top sliced at roughly 45 degrees. Cut into that sloped head is a small socket-like hollow, about 10 centimetres across and 12 centimetres deep, whose original purpose is not recorded. The cross itself is not a carved relief but an incised one, meaning it is drawn into the stone's surface rather than raised from it. Two parallel lines, U-shaped in profile and only about 8 millimetres wide, trace a plain cross on the broader east-facing face. The shaft runs almost the full height of the stone, the arms branch off three quarters of the way up, and the whole design is capped by a horizontal line sitting about 35 centimetres below the angled top. The arms do not terminate in any decorative way; they simply stop at the edges of the pillar. Some scholars had suggested the cross was incised onto a pre-existing standing stone, but current thinking considers this unlikely. What is particularly striking is that the unusual sloping top of the Clare Island pillar is almost exactly replicated on a second cross-inscribed pillar at Dadreen near the Silver Strand in south-west Mayo, raising questions about a shared tradition of stone working, or perhaps even a shared hand, across that part of the county.