What makes it quietly arresting is what is carved on its faces: both the north and south sides bear a Greek cross formed from arcs, enclosed within two incised concentric rings. But it is the north face that holds the stranger detail. Above that ring composition walks a small incised figure, drawn in side profile with visible facial features, wearing a bell-shaped garment and carrying a crozier, the hooked staff associated with early Christian bishops and abbots. The figure is simple, almost spare, but unmistakably purposeful.

Known as St Gobnait's Stone, this slab was not always where it now stands. It originally stood approximately 60 metres to the west-south-west, and when it was moved, the antiquarian John Windele recorded something that was noted by Kelly in 1897: beneath the mound where the stone had stood, there were many bones. That detail lends the original site a character it no longer carries. The scholar Françoise Henry, writing in 1952, dated the stone to the second half of the 7th century, placing it in the early medieval period when Irish monasticism was producing some of its most distinctive carved stonework. Henry also observed that a treble cross decorating the top arm of the cross on the south face appeared to be a fairly recent addition, a later hand augmenting an already ancient object. The slab lies roughly 18 metres south of the site of a holy well, and that proximity is almost certainly not accidental; early Christian sites in Ireland frequently clustered such elements together. Researchers Hurley and O'Flaherty noted in 1981 that this stone shares design similarities with another cross-slab at Bawnatemple, some 19 kilometres to the east, suggesting a shared regional tradition of carving in this part of Cork.