A (broad): The flat, plain edge moulding is very broad. The tapering panel contains the head and torso of a fettered profile beast. The body has a double outline and almost parallel edges, lying against the right-hand moulding. The legs are lost. The head hangs; it has a domed brow containing an incised circular eye. The jaws gape and each has a horizontal slit. A coiled tongue appears from the mouth. From behind the eye a pigtail extends to form a fetter which crosses the neck and chest. The beast fills the available space and odd pellets serve as fillers.

B (narrow): A broad, flat edge moulding is damaged. The lower panel contains a broad, flat, undulating band with contoured edges. At the internal bends it erupts into clumsy spiral scrolls with angular offshoots. At the right-hand edge is a small leaf with twin berries. The stem is crossed twice by narrow bands immediately after turning. At the damaged top the stem appears to branch into narrow fronds.

C (broad): Broken away.

D (narrow): Only the left-hand flat moulding survives. Within the panel, lying close to the edge, is the central part of a profile beast with double-outline to its upper edge and a thin incised spiral joint for the lost complementary curve to the animal, and an angular scroll fills the intervening space.

The monument links the Middleton profile beasts and the grave-cover, no. 5 (Ill. 648), by having both types of animal. The pendant head with slit jaws relates closely to the Sinnington series (Lang 1973), and here the fetter actually weaves the body and jaws, unlike Levisham 1, in the Sinnington manner. The coiled tongue is distinctively local to Levisham: compare the beast on no. 5. The other beast of this shaft is disposed in the same manner as that of no. 5. The leg joint has a Sinnington-type scroll but the fetter acts strangely, penetrating the contoured edge at one point and lying in a loose trail to complement the curve of the animal. It ends in a tight scroll. The looseness of the composition distinguishes it from the Sinnington group on the one hand and its sense of balance from the Middleton group on the other.

The foliate ornament on face B is particularly interesting. The Levisham undulating, contoured ribbon has scrolls which appear as off-shoots, the fetter being reduced to a passing bar placed in the customary Anglian plant-scroll position of the node. Here the convention of the ribbon beast has been mixed with the pre-Viking plant-scroll motif which is extant nearby at Hackness, Lastingham, and Kirkdale (Ills. 454, 587 and 608, 558). Anglo-Scandinavian sculptors did experiment in Ryedale with the plant-scroll, for example at Middleton (Ill. 683), and elsewhere in the North Riding indulged in revivalism of the plant-scroll, such as a shaft at Brompton, North Riding (Collingwood 1907, fig. i on 301). The foliate nature of the Levisham piece is not a reflex of late Viking-age styles but a turning back to Anglian patterns. Its originality lies in the adaptation to conventions of fashionable animal ornament.