The piece is the head of a small plain cross, measuring roughly thirty centimetres tall, fifteen centimetres wide, and barely three centimetres thick, a sliver of carved stone that could be lifted in one hand.

The scholar Harold Leask catalogued it in 1950, grouping it alongside a closely related cross head from the same site and noting its plain, undecorated character. That plainness is itself worth pausing over. The great carved crosses of early Irish Christianity, with their interlaced panels and figured scenes, tend to draw the eye and the scholarship, while objects like this one, unadorned and fragmentary, quietly accumulate in store rooms. Leask assigned it a number, gave its dimensions, and moved on without reproducing an image. The cross head survives, but in a sense it has always occupied the margins of the record.