Its limbs expand slightly as they reach their ends, its shaft tapers, and the whole thing is barely five centimetres thick. It is, in Harold Leask's own measured phrasing, a plain cross. No knotwork, no figural carving, no inscription. Just the essential shape, worn down to almost nothing.

Leask, writing in 1950, recorded the cross as part of his survey of Glendalough's national monuments, and his description places it among a numbered sequence of similar fragments. The cross is now held in the Stone Store at the visitor centre, removed from whatever outdoor context it once occupied. Early medieval stone crosses of this type, freestanding or grave-marking, were common features of Irish monastic enclosures, and the plainness of this example is not necessarily a sign of low status; many such crosses were left undecorated, their function as boundary or devotional markers being sufficient reason for their existence. Glendalough itself was one of the great monastic foundations of early Christian Ireland, associated with St Kevin, and its landscape is still dense with ecclesiastical stonework of varying age and condition.