That plainness is part of what makes it worth noticing. While the elaborately carved high crosses of early medieval Ireland tend to attract the most attention, this Latin cross on the Lugduff slope says nothing except that someone, at some point, thought this particular spot warranted marking.

The cross is cut from mica-schist, a locally available metamorphic rock with a faintly glittering surface, and measures just over a metre in height and roughly half a metre wide. It sits to the north of Reefert Church, one of the smaller ruined churches within the Glendalough complex, and to the east-northeast of a stone enclosure whose age and purpose remain uncertain. A cairn, a deliberate mound of loose stones, holds the cross upright. By 1971, when surveyor Patrick Healy documented the site for an unpublished Office of Public Works report on Glendalough's ancient monuments, a second cross-base had already disappeared. That base was triangular in form, suggesting it once supported a separate cross entirely, though no trace of that cross remains either. What Healy recorded was already a fragment of something more complete.