The slab is modest in size, roughly sixty centimetres square and twelve centimetres thick, yet it once carried a carefully carved ringed cross, the kind where a circle intersects the arms, filling almost the entire face of the stone. What makes it quietly arresting is not the cross itself but a fragmentary inscription above it, on the left-hand side, reading OR DO. In early medieval Irish usage, this is shorthand for the Latin oráit do, meaning "a prayer for", typically followed by the name of the person commemorated. The name, if there ever was one, is long gone.

The inscription was recorded by at least two researchers working independently in the early twentieth century, Crawford in 1913 and O'Flanagan in 1927, which suggests it was legible, if faint, within living memory. By the time Higgins catalogued it in 1987, the lettering had deteriorated significantly, and today it is described as very difficult to make out. The cross itself is described as having straight-ended terminals, meaning the arms do not taper or flare but finish bluntly, a relatively common form in early Irish stone carving. Clonfert Cathedral, founded according to tradition by St Brendan in the sixth century and best known for its elaborately carved Romanesque doorway, has accumulated centuries of burials around it, and this slab is one of the less conspicuous survivals in that long accumulation.