A leacht is a low, flat-topped cairn of stones used in early Irish monasticism as a devotional monument, often associated with prayer stations or the commemoration of the dead. This particular slab, roughly shaped and no taller than a child, would attract little attention in most settings. On Skellig Michael, it carries a weight entirely out of proportion to its modest dimensions.

The cross was recorded in 1996 by archaeologists A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan during their survey of the Iveragh Peninsula, and their description is precise in its plainness: a roughly shaped slab with a rounded head, measuring 0.58 metres in height, 0.3 metres in width, and just 0.03 metres in thickness. It is, in other words, quite thin, barely more than a large flat stone that someone has given a head. Yet that rounding at the top is deliberate, a gesture toward cross form that connects this small marker to the wider tradition of early medieval stone crosses found across Ireland and the western islands. Whether it was carved on the island or carried there is not recorded. What is clear is that it was placed at a specific location on a specific leacht, suggesting it had a defined role within the ritual landscape the monks carefully organised across the rock.