The piece measures just 0.24 metres long and 0.38 metres at its widest, yet on both faces the outline of a wheel is still discernible, the defining feature of an Irish ringed high cross, where a circle connects the arms to form a halo of stone around the central boss.

High crosses of this type were raised at Irish monastic sites from roughly the eighth century onwards, serving variously as boundary markers, preaching aids, and focal points for prayer. Reefert church, whose name is thought to derive from the Irish for "royal burial place", sits in the upper reaches of Glendalough, the early medieval monastic city founded by St Kevin. The cross would have stood close to this small, roofless Romanesque church, and its shaft and base still do: those elements remain in situ at Reefert, separated from the fragment now in the visitor centre. A drawing of the cross, made before the head was removed or lost from the site, was published by Robert Cochrane in his historical and descriptive notes on the ecclesiastical remains at Glendalough, issued as part of the Eightieth Annual Report of the Commissioners of Public Works in Ireland, eventually published in Dublin in 1925. That document gives some sense of what the complete monument looked like before time and circumstance divided it.

Visitors to Glendalough who walk the upper valley to Reefert church can still see the shaft and base standing where they were set, while the surviving head fragment, catalogued separately, is held away from the elements. The two parts of the same object now occupy different spaces within the same landscape, a small illustration of how monastic sites accumulate losses over centuries, piece by piece.