The stone has been diagonally tooled as a building stone in the fine ashlar masonry of the archway. Near its left-hand, i.e. eastern edge is a small incised equal-armed cross of type A1, probably its original decoration and a consecration cross. The graffito of a ship is cut through the tooling and placed reasonably centrally to the stone or slightly to the right-hand side, occupying fairly fully the space left by the cross. It measures 64 × 23 cm (24.25 × 9 in). Though its details are difficult to read, the ship clearly has a double-ended hull, with a bow and stern that rise sharply from the keel. A mast is stepped approximately centrally, with indications of a yard for a square sail set at an angle to it. A diagonal incision towards the left-hand end of the vessel perhaps is meant to mark the position of a steering oar or quarter rudder. Other features noted by Jones-Baker are hard to confirm and more debatable.

Appendix A item (stones dating from Saxo-Norman overlap period or of uncertain date).

Jones-Baker (1986) has emphasised the potential importance of this graffito as a contemporary portrayal of a Danish or Viking ship exceptional in England. In this she takes it that the architectural context is likely to date the graffito to the last quarter of the tenth century. In addition she perceives details in the incisions, particularly in respect of oars, oar-ports, rigging and hull shape, that are technically interesting for nautical history but are by no means unequivocally present in the photographic record of the stone. Nevertheless in the broadest terms the ship is one of a type known from excavations in Viking contexts in Scandinavia and shown in William's fleet on the Bayeux Tapestry. The architectural context of the lower parts of the crossing at Stow, however, is convincingly assessed by the best recent scholarship as belonging to the middle years of the eleventh century under the patronage of Earl Leofric rather than earlier (cf. especially Fernie 1983, 124–7; Gem 1984, 252; Fernie 1985, 73; Gem 1986, 153; Gem 1988, 26). The stone bearing the graffito is at a convenient height for working in situ (Jones-Baker 1986, 395), which confirms the evidence of layout and relationship of incisions to tooling in arguing that the graffito is secondary. The architectural evidence therefore provides a terminus post quem, and given the general conservatism of ship design the date of execution might easily be post-Conquest, perhaps (for example) during either of the major building campaigns of c. 1090 or the mid twelfth century. Comparable and near-contemporary graffito-style depictions of ships on both stone and wood are known from Jarlshof in Shetland and Löddeköppinge in southern Sweden (Graham-Campbell and Kidd 1980, 26–7, ills. 7a–b) and from late eleventh- or early twelfth-century excavated contexts in Dublin (Graham-Campbell 1980, ill. on 59).

For a discussion of consecration crosses at this early date, see under Cranwell 3.