The fragment is small, roughly half a metre long and just over twenty centimetres high, yet it preserves a Crucifixion scene of considerable detail. Carved in false relief, a technique in which the background is cut back to make the figures appear to project forward without being fully three-dimensional, it shows the lower half of Christ on the cross and, to his left, the lower half of St John. Christ's feet overlap, the right placed over the left, pinned by a single nail, and the folds of his loin cloth fall in careful detail. St John wears a pleated garment beneath a mantle or brat, the traditional Irish term for a cloak or outer wrap, gathered under his bent left elbow. The section depicting Our Lady, which would have occupied the right side of the panel, has broken away, though the upper portion of that same figure, showing her head and torso, is also held at the Kilkenny depot.

The fragment came from the end slab of a chest tomb, a type of raised rectangular tomb common in late medieval Ireland, and is made of limestone. Its closest known parallel is an end slab from St Patrick's Cathedral in Cashel, County Tipperary, which the art historian John Hunt, writing in 1974, described as a late degenerate production closely connected with the O'Tunney workshop. The O'Tunneys were a family of sculptors active in the Kilkenny and Tipperary region whose work decorated many significant ecclesiastical monuments of the period. That stylistic connection places this Leggetsrath fragment in the late sixteenth century, a time when the workshop tradition was winding down and individual pieces were becoming less refined. The breakage and dispersal of the panel, now held across at least two separate fragments in the same depot, is itself a small record of how such objects have survived, partially and by chance, rather than by design.