It is not a cross in the conventional sense, not the tall carved slab a visitor might expect, but rather a cross base with only a stub of shaft remaining. What survives is a low block of mica schist, a dark, flaky metamorphic rock common to the Wicklow uplands, measuring roughly 68 centimetres by 55 centimetres and standing just 22 centimetres high. Cut into its upper surface is a mortise, the square socket intended to hold a standing shaft, and wedged within that socket is the broken butt of the shaft itself, just 22 centimetres long and 5 centimetres wide. The cross it once supported is gone.

The fragment was recorded by Patrick Healy in a 1972 survey of ancient monuments at Glendalough carried out for the Office of Public Works. Healy noted its position as approximately six metres north-east of the north-east corner of the chancel of the associated church. Glendalough, of course, was one of the great early Christian monastic sites of Ireland, founded according to tradition by St Kevin in the sixth century, and the wider valley is dense with ecclesiastical remains spanning several centuries. A cross of this kind, set into a base with a mortised socket, would have been a familiar feature of such communities, used to mark sacred boundaries, processional routes, or burial grounds. That the shaft is missing entirely, leaving only its root still locked in stone, gives the fragment an oddly unfinished quality, as though something was interrupted and never resolved.