There is no edge moulding or panel division. The scene consists of a confused crowd of human figures and animals, cleverly contrived so that a single incised line serves for the outline of two contiguous motifs.

The principal motif is a profile human figure facing right, his arms outspread and his head lifted. There is a thin incised line across his waist; otherwise he is naked. The large eye is lentoid, beneath hair depicted by hatching. The lines of the nose and chin are almost parallel. From the side of the nose a drooping moustache hangs to the chin. Below the figure's left arm a large canine animal with a thin tail and chevron collar springs to the right. Its lentoid eye has a double outline and is placed between gaping jaws and a serrated crest between pricked ears. Squeezed between the human arm and the animal's back is a serpent, its head in the man's arm-pit and its eye gouged deeply with a double outline.

Within the jaws of the canine beast is the foot of another human figure who faces left and wears a pointed cap or helmet. Another, identical with him, with the same posture, is placed near by, and a similar head is scratched on the left of the stone. All the figures with arms outspread have the same type of eye. Below the quadruped are two other figures with arms outspread and heads similar to the principal figure's. Beneath the tail of the main animal is a profile head facing left, rather more deeply cut than the graffiti at the top of the stone.

In some lights it is possible to see a frontal human mask with incised eyes and nose cut in the Middleton manner, and there may also be a Crucifix, on the right-hand side.

There is no formal organization in the design of the carving which must be free style graffiti, considering its position and stylistic character. It is often more deeply cut than the Jarlshof (Shetland) graffiti, probably owing to the softer stone, and there does seem to be a strong narrative element, unlike the isolated motifs of the Northern Isles.

The scene is very probably the destruction of the gods at Ragnarök, where Thor fights with the world serpent and Óðinn is eaten by the wolf Fenrir. Several Anglo-Scandinavian monuments in Cumbria depict the battle with the serpent, for example, at Great Clifton, Penrith, and Gosforth (Collingwood 1927, 157, 165, 172); the iconography of Óðinn's foot in the wolf's jaw also occurs on a slab at Andreas in the Isle of Man (Kermode 1907, no. 102, pl. LII). If the faintest of the scratchings does represent a Crucifixion, then the juxtaposition with Ragnarök would find a parallel in the Gosforth cross (Bailey and Cramp 1988, 101–3).

The trick of using contiguous lines for carving adjacent motifs is employed on the Heysham hogback (Lang 1984a, 138), so that technique as well as iconography tends to point to links with the colonies of the north-west. That the carvings are undoubtedly in a Viking-Age idiom is further corroborated by their close resemblance to the Oseberg cart decoration which shows a man contending with beasts, his head raised in the Skipwith manner (Wilson and Klindt-Jensen 1966, pl. Xa). One cannot expect this graffito to reflect fashionable stylistic developments; it is likely that certain long-established conventions have influenced the details of the scene.

The pointed head-gear of some of the squatting figures is common in the North Riding, for example, at Middleton and Kirklevington, and the distinction between helmets and pointed caps remains speculative, though Bailey has identified nose-guards (1980, 234).

The context of the carving may be consistent with a date in the Anglo-Scandinavian period. It is incorporated into the earliest pre-Conquest phase of the church, considered by the Taylors to date from before c. 950 (Taylor and Taylor 1965, II, 550, 554). Conceivably it may have been introduced as a later repair, but its position near ground level and the informal character of the carving both strongly suggest that the graffiti were cut in situ.