What makes it quietly arresting is not its size but its condition and what it implies: this is only the lower portion of a cross-slab, the upper section long gone, yet enough survives to show that someone once went to considerable effort to display it properly. The surviving piece is set into a granite mortised base, a socketed block designed to hold the slab upright, though that base has since broken into three parts, one of which is now missing entirely.

The slab itself is made from mica schist, a metamorphic rock with a layered, slightly glittering surface common in the geology of the Wicklow uplands. On its face it carries the lower part of a cross carved in high relief, meaning the cross form projects outward from the surface rather than being incised into it. The bottom of the shaft is stepped, a detail that suggests this was once a more elaborate composition. The site sits within the broader monastic landscape of Glendalough, one of the most significant early medieval ecclesiastical settlements in Ireland, and the cross-slab almost certainly belonged to that devotional world, marking ground or commemorating someone whose name is now unrecoverable. Patrick Healy, who recorded the fragment in a 1972 survey of ancient monuments at Glendalough for the Office of Public Works, gave it a precise description but could not restore what time and fracture had removed.