The inscription carved into one of its panels breaks off mid-name: "ór dogr..." or "ór dogri...", a fragment of Old Irish that translates roughly as "Pray for Gr...", the rest worn away by centuries of exposure. Whoever Gr. was, the appeal for intercession outlasted the identity of the person making it.

The slab itself is substantial, just under one and a half metres long and tapering from a slightly rounded top to a narrow base. Nearly its entire face is occupied by a Latin cross, the form of the cross built up from, and bordered by, a dense interlace pattern, the kind of knotwork familiar from early medieval Irish stonework and manuscript art. When H. S. Crawford examined and drew the slab in 1922, he could still make out details that are now far harder to read: small cross-shaped voids punched into the interlace, and certain inconsistencies in the knotwork's execution, places where the pattern loses its regularity in ways that suggest either a deliberate flourish or a mason working through a complex design without a fixed template. Between the decorated border and the arms of the cross, four blank panels were left, and it is in two of these, on the right-hand side, that the worn inscription survives. Crawford's published drawing from that year remains one of the clearest records of what the slab once looked like, the surface having continued to deteriorate in the century since.

The round tower to which the slab is now fixed, a tall, tapering stone structure of the kind built across Ireland between roughly the ninth and twelfth centuries, often served as a bell tower and place of refuge for monastic communities. That this cross-slab has ended up mounted on its exterior wall suggests it was relocated at some point, its original position in the graveyard unknown. The name it was carved to preserve has gone with it.