It is easy to walk past without a second glance, and that near-invisibility is part of what makes it worth attention. The shaft is not a complete cross; the top is fractured, and what survives is a carefully shaped piece of fine-grained mica schist, the edges convex rather than flat, giving it a subtly rounded profile that distinguishes it from cruder stonework nearby.

The details recorded by Patrick Healy in a 1972 Office of Public Works survey of ancient monuments at Glendalough are precise enough to reward close reading. The shaft measures 0.65 metres in height, tapering from 0.34 metres wide at the base to 0.25 metres at the broken top, and is just 0.07 metres thick. A 2.5 centimetre dowel hole cut into the top face suggests a separate cross-head was once fixed above it, slotted onto a peg in the manner common to early medieval Irish stone crosses. The shaft itself sits tenoned into a base of coarser mica schist, a different grade of stone from the shaft, measuring just over a metre long. That distinction between the finer shaft and the rougher base implies two separate phases of working, or at least two separate quarrying decisions, by whoever originally made and set it up.