It is relatively small, its shaft almost certainly broken at some point in its long history, and its ring is unpierced, meaning the spaces between the arms and the ring are filled with solid stone rather than open to the sky. That last detail sets it apart from many of the more celebrated ringed, or high, crosses of early medieval Ireland, where the pierced ring is often considered the defining visual feature.

The cross was described in 1950 by Harold Leask, an authority on Irish ecclesiastical architecture, who noted its position immediately to the west of the Priest's House and speculated that it may not always have stood there. He drew a comparison with St Kevin's Cross elsewhere in the Glendalough complex, suggesting this granite cross might originally have marked the boundary of the ancient burial ground rather than serving as an architectural ornament for the building beside it. Glendalough, known historically as Sevenchurches after the cluster of early Christian remains in the valley, grew around the monastery reputedly founded by St Kevin in the sixth century, and the site accumulated layers of construction, burial, and devotion over many centuries. A drawing of the cross was recorded by Robert Cochrane in a detailed survey of the ecclesiastical remains published in 1925, drawn from an official report of 1911 to 1912, which suggests the cross was being documented and taken seriously as an architectural fragment well before modern heritage practice formalised such work.

The cross sits in a part of the Glendalough monastic enclosure that rewards slower looking. The Priest's House itself is a small Romanesque structure whose name is a later folk attribution rather than a historically verified function, and the proximity of this quiet, solid little cross to its west gable gives the spot an accidental quality, as though two survivors from different moments in the site's history have simply ended up together.