What remains of the lettering, faintly incised in Irish characters, amounts to two fragments: ÓR D. The rest is gone, worn or flaked away at some point in the centuries since it was cut. Those two partial words are all that survive of what was almost certainly a longer memorial or devotional formula, and they are just about enough to hint at what has been lost without allowing anyone to reconstruct it.

The slab measures roughly 1.5 metres by 0.54 metres and is only about five centimetres thick, a relatively modest piece of stone for a site as significant as Glendalough. The surviving letters most likely belonged to a commemorative inscription of the kind common in early medieval Irish monasticism, where ÓR, an abbreviation of the Irish word for prayer, typically introduced a request to pray for a named individual. The D that follows may be the opening of a personal name or a dedication, but without the remainder there is no way to be certain. Patrick Healy, who documented the slab in an unpublished Office of Public Works report in 1972, noted both the smoothness of the face and the faintness of the incision, suggesting the lettering was never deeply cut and has become increasingly difficult to read over time.

The slab stands upright in the graveyard, erected just to the north of the kerbed surround of a grave plot marked by a high-cross-style headstone bearing the name Moloney. It sits approximately 43 metres south-south-west of the round tower, which makes it straightforward enough to locate once you have your bearings. The round tower at Glendalough, a tall tapering stone structure built as both a bell tower and a place of refuge, is hard to miss, and the graveyard surrounding it is dense with centuries of burials. The Moloney headstone, carved in a style imitating the great medieval high crosses, serves as the practical landmark for finding the inscribed slab alongside it.