It is easy to overlook, measuring just 0.53 metres high and 0.27 metres wide, with a thickness of barely four centimetres, yet its placement was deliberate. This was not a monument raised to be seen from a distance; it marked a threshold.

The cross rests on a leacht, a low stone platform or cairn of a type associated with early Irish monastic sites, typically used for prayer or commemoration. Its form is simple: slightly projecting arms and a flat head, with no elaborate carving or ornament. This plainness is consistent with the early medieval monastic tradition on Skellig Michael, where the community of monks who lived on the rock some twelve kilometres off the Kerry coast built in stone out of necessity and prayed with a rigour that their architecture reflects. The cross was described and measured by archaeologists A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan in their 1996 survey of the Iveragh peninsula, and that record remains the primary source for its dimensions and location.

For anyone who reaches the island, the cross sits at a point where the effort of the climb begins to resolve into the monastic settlement proper. The entrance passage to the main terrace narrows the approach, and this modest slab, positioned at its inner end, would have served as a final, quiet marker before the monks stepped into the space where they lived and worked.