The inscription is brief enough to raise more questions than it answers. Who was Becgan? A monk, an abbot, a patron? The slab does not say, and no surviving text fills the gap. What it offers instead is the carving itself, a composition of unusual density and care for a piece of stone roughly 83 centimetres tall and 61 centimetres wide.

The slab, which was originally trapezoidal in shape, has suffered damage at the upper right and lower left-hand corners, but enough survives to read the full design. At its centre sits a roundel bearing an interlocking cruciform pattern, from which a three-line Greek cross extends outward. The four terminals where the arms end are semicircular and each differently decorated. The upper and lower ones carry pairs of conjoined spirals rising from a central stem, while those on the horizontal arms use a meandering pattern and a row of small raised dots called pellets. A frame of parallel lines runs around the whole composition, following the trapezoidal outline of the slab rather than imposing a rectangular border. Cross-slabs of this kind are a distinctly early medieval Irish form, functioning as grave markers or commemorative stones, and the ornamental vocabulary here, spirals, interlace, pellet rows, belongs firmly to that tradition. Higgins catalogued it in 1987, and earlier notices by Crawford in 1913 and O'Flanagan in 1927 confirm it had already drawn scholarly attention long before any modern survey.

Clonfert Cathedral, itself a site of considerable antiquity associated with the sixth-century saint Brendan, is in the south of County Galway near the border with Offaly. The slab is built directly into the fabric of the north wall, which means it is not displayed as a freestanding object but rather encountered as part of the building itself, easy to walk past without registering what the carved surface contains.