It is easy to walk past without a second glance, yet it is recorded as a cross, or rather as part of one, its original dimensions and purpose now only partially legible in what survives.

The fragment was documented by Patrick Healy in a 1972 survey of ancient monuments at Glendalough, an area dense with early medieval ecclesiastical remains. Healy described it as part of a small rough cross, cut from mica schist, a fine-grained metamorphic rock common in the Wicklow uplands and well suited to basic shaping without specialist tools. The surviving piece measures 0.7 metres by 0.35 metres. Whether it is the upper or lower portion of a once-taller cross, or how much has been lost, the record does not say. Its roughness suggests it was never a highly worked monument; crosses of this kind, sometimes called pillar crosses or simple slab crosses, appear throughout early Irish ecclesiastical sites and likely served as grave markers or boundary indicators rather than the elaborate high crosses more commonly associated with Glendalough itself.