Held in the Stone Store at the site's visitor centre, it is the head of a ring cross, a type of early Christian cross in which a circle of stone connects the arms, giving the form its characteristic enclosed shape. What makes this particular piece quietly curious is its scale: barely five centimetres thick, it is a miniature of a form more commonly encountered at commanding, near-human height.

The cross head was documented and described by Harold Leask, whose 1950 survey of Glendalough remains a foundational reference for the site. Leask noted that the ring is entirely plain, undecorated, and that the head and arms project only slightly beyond the ring itself. More unusually, the arms are tilted upwards, rising above the centre of the ring rather than aligning with it in the conventional horizontal plane. This small detail, easy to miss in a written description, gives the fragment an almost informal quality, as though it was worked by a hand more concerned with expression than precision. Whether it was ever part of a freestanding monument, a grave marker, or something else entirely, the notes do not say.