It is not a monument that draws crowds to itself. Worn considerably over time, it now sits in the Stone Store at the visitor centre rather than in open air, the kind of object that requires a moment of deliberate attention before it yields anything at all.

The cross head was recorded and described by Harold Leask in his 1950 study of Glendalough, in which he catalogued the national monuments then vested in the Commissioners of Public Works. Leask noted it as a plain Latin cross form, the incised decoration reduced by wear to something faint and almost tentative. A Latin cross, as distinct from the ringed high crosses more commonly associated with early Irish monasticism, is simply the familiar unadorned form, the vertical longer than the horizontal. The double-line incision suggests a deliberate if modest decorative intent, a framing of the cross shape within itself, though the degree of wear makes it difficult now to read with any confidence. Its precise original location within the wider monastic complex is not recorded.