The stone itself is modest enough, lying on its long axis beside the R115 and a small gravel pit on Glassamucky Mountain, measuring just over a metre in length and less than half a metre high. But the cross cut into its exposed face, with its expanded terminals, the slightly flared ends that give each arm of the cross a paddle-like finish common in early Christian stonework, gives the whole thing a gravity that outlasts whatever occasion first prompted someone to pick up a chisel.

Local tradition holds that the spot marks where the body of a chimney sweep was discovered after he was caught in a snowstorm and froze to death on the mountain. The story is recorded in compiled local sources, including a volume edited by K. Swords in 2009, and earlier references to the stone appear in work by Healy in 1961 and Price in 1959. Whether the cross was carved to mark that death specifically, or whether an older roadside marker simply absorbed the tragedy into its memory over time, is not clear from the record. What persists is the name, precise and melancholy, attaching a particular kind of life, a working life spent in soot and narrow spaces, to a particular death on open, exposed ground.

The stone sits to the east of the R115, the old military road that runs through the Dublin Mountains, close enough to the road to spot from a passing car if you know to look for it. The gravel pit nearby serves as a rough landmark. The cross itself is on the exposed face of the boulder, so there is no need to move around it; it presents itself directly. The mountain terrain here is open and can close in quickly in poor weather, which lends the sweep's story a certain plausibility to anyone who has misjudged the conditions up on the plateau. The carved cross measures roughly 40 centimetres high and 35 centimetres wide, small enough that it rewards a closer look rather than a glance from the road.