The object now known as St Gobnet's Stone was moved at some point from its original position, roughly sixty metres to the west-southwest, and when it was lifted, the antiquarian John Windele observed that bones lay beneath the mound on which it had stood. That detail, recorded by Kelly in 1897, gives the stone a quietly unsettling prehistory, suggesting it marked or covered a burial long before anyone thought to relocate it for safekeeping. It now sits set in concrete within a circular stone wall, which is a rather prosaic fate for something this old.

The carving on the slab is what makes it genuinely remarkable. Both faces carry a Greek cross formed from arcs rather than straight lines, enclosed by two incised concentric rings. On the southern face, a treble cross decorates the top arm, though the art historian Françoise Henry, writing in 1952, considered this addition comparatively recent. The northern face is more arresting: above the encircled cross, a figure walks in side profile, incised simply but with recognisable facial features, wearing a bell-shaped garment and carrying a crozier, the hooked pastoral staff associated with early Christian bishops and abbots. Henry dated the stone to the second half of the seventh century, placing it firmly in the period of early Irish monasticism, when such carved slabs served as grave markers or devotional objects at ecclesiastical sites. The association with St Gobnet, a sixth-century abbess venerated in this part of Cork, ties the stone into a wider local landscape of early Christian memory. Researchers Hurley and O'Flaherty noted in 1981 that the stone shares stylistic features with another carved stone at Bawnatemple, roughly nineteen kilometres to the east, hinting at a regional tradition of this kind of work rather than an isolated curiosity.