The stone is decorated in low relief on its only visible face with an interlacing pattern that can now be read with less confidence than when seen and interpreted by Butler (1963–4, fig. 2, no. 8; see Ill. 373). It appears to comprise at one end of the stone a four-strand plait, truncated by the stone's broken end, that is at the point of being transformed into a three- or two-strand plait, and at the other end a fragment of narrower, apparently two-strand plait. In both sections the strands are elaborated with a medial incised line. Between the two sections, four drilled holes may be the bases of the interstices in interlace linking the two, but the pattern itself cannot be made out. Along either edge there seems to be a broad border with no sign of decoration.

In its present worn state, it is not easy to offer a useful interpretation of the form of monument or parallels for its decoration. It might, as hitherto supposed, be the edge of a cross-shaft or alternatively part of a panel of interlace around a plain cross on a flat grave-cover. Its most significant aspect is its stone type, which is alien to Lincolnshire and paralleled in the county only by the shaft, Crowle 1 (Ills. 144–50), and the cover, Holton le Clay 1 (Ill. 203). Like them it originated petrologically near Knaresborough in the West Riding of Yorkshire, but also like them its immediate origin was probably reused Roman masonry from the city of York (cf. Morris 1988; Buckland 1988), perhaps redistributed as finished funerary sculpture. It may indeed be that the breakdown of the interlace from four strands to two within the stone is more akin to the work on the York group of grave-covers (Pattison 1973, pls. XLVIII–XLIX; Lang 1991, 39–40) than to anything comparably accessible to northern Lincolnshire.