It is easy to miss entirely, partly because of its modest dimensions and partly because it sits in the company of ordinary modern graves, its age and purpose not announced by any obvious marker.

The slab is roughly rectangular, measuring just 0.4 metres wide and 0.45 metres high, and leans eastward where it has settled into the ground over centuries. Cut into its face is a cross no larger than the palm of a hand, 0.11 metres high and 0.09 metres wide, incised with a shaft and arms each about a centimetre across and half a centimetre deep. At the base of the shaft, the carver left a faint hemispherical form, a kind of low rounded pedestal, which gives the cross a slightly formal, considered quality despite its tiny scale. Cross-slabs of this type, simple upright stones bearing an incised or relief cross, were used throughout early Christian Ireland to mark graves or to sanctify a place, and were produced across several centuries in monastic communities such as Glendalough.

Finding this particular slab takes a little patience. It lies approximately 25.5 metres south-west of the round tower, but the most practical navigation point is the modern headstone of Edward Magee, who died in 1993. A second, low cross-slab stands about 1.5 metres south of that headstone, and this one is a further 2.35 metres to the west-south-west of that. The proximity of these two early carved stones to each other, and to centuries of subsequent burials, reflects how continuously the ground at Glendalough has been used as a place of the dead, with each generation laying its markers down alongside those already there.