Nearly two metres long and tapered to a wedge shape with carefully worked chamfered edges, it was originally the lid of a coffin-tomb, a raised box-like monument set above the floor rather than flush with it. It is almost entirely intact, losing only its lower right-hand corner and possibly a sliver of its base, where the stonework appears unfinished. Carved into its face in low relief is a large bottonée or foliated cross, so called because its arms terminate in decorative trefoil forms, the three-lobed leaf shape familiar from Gothic stonework. What makes this particular slab unusual is a pair of extra arms set diagonally on the shaft of the cross, angled upward and also ending in trefoils. No strict parallel has been identified for this feature, and one researcher, McDermott, writing in 2009, proposed that these diagonal arms may have been intended to evoke Christ's outstretched arms on the cross, a theological detail quietly encoded in the geometry of the stone.

The foliated cross as a decorative form was closely associated with Anglo-Norman funerary culture, and comparable examples have been recorded at Bannow in County Wexford and at the Dominican friary in Kilkenny. Its presence at Strade places the slab most likely in the thirteenth century, the period when Dominican houses were being established across Ireland under the patronage of Anglo-Norman and Hiberno-Norman families. Strade friary itself has a complicated foundation history, passing between Franciscan and Dominican ownership, but the cluster of five grave-slabs now displayed together in the chancel, at least two of which share a similar foliated cross design, points to the friary serving as a burial site for patrons of some local consequence during this early period.