Held in the stone store at the visitor centre, this cross head is barely two centimetres thick, described in the mid-twentieth century as the head of a rude cross, the word rude here carrying its older meaning of roughly worked or unfinished rather than any suggestion of crudeness as a failing. Its thinness is what sets it apart; at just over a centimetre and a quarter in the original measurement, it is a sliver of carved stone, more like a flat slab fragment than the substantial high crosses that draw most attention at the site.

The cross belongs to the ecclesiastical landscape of Sevenchurches, the traditional name for the monastic city at Glendalough in County Wicklow, where a cluster of early Christian buildings survives in various states of preservation. The architectural historian Harold Leask documented this fragment in his 1950 study of the Glendalough national monuments, noting that it was formed in a fashion similar to another piece in the same collection. Leask's work remains a foundational reference for understanding the carved stonework of the site, and his drawings record details that might otherwise go unnoticed. The cross head was observed at the stone store in August 2005, suggesting it has spent recent decades in supervised storage rather than on public display, kept alongside other architectural fragments recovered from the wider monastic precinct.