It measures roughly a metre in length externally and just over eight inches in depth internally, hewn from granite into a form that is unmistakably sarcophagus-like. A sarcophagus, in the strict sense, is a stone container intended for a body, and this object fits that description in outline if not entirely in function. What sets it apart from almost every other example of its type is the absence of drain-holes. Most stone sarcophagi were pierced at the base to allow the gradual drainage of fluids from the decomposing body within. This one was not, which raises questions about its original purpose that have not been cleanly answered.

The more intriguing detail is what may once have sat on top of it. A stone effigy now located in Arthurstown village, roughly five hundred metres to the east, is thought to have served as a lid for this very trough. If that connection is correct, the two objects have been separated at some point and now sit in different locations, one in a graveyard, one in a village, each incomplete without the other. Whether the trough ever held a body, or whether it served some other ritual or funerary purpose, remains genuinely uncertain. Its child-sized proportions and the lack of drainage make it anomalous among comparable medieval stonework in the region.