It is a portion of an early medieval cross-slab, the kind of incised grave marker or commemorative stone that once stood across Irish ecclesiastical sites, and it survives in pieces, its original height and purpose now only partly recoverable.

The slab, as described by Harold Leask in 1950, measures roughly 1.32 metres by 0.66 metres at its current extent, and it tapers, suggesting the surviving piece is not the whole. Within a single-line border, the carving shows a ringed cross, the distinctive wheel-headed form associated with early Irish Christianity, rendered in two incised lines. The top of the cross is unusual: it ends in a pointed and looped form, a detail that sets it apart from the more common blunt or expanded terminals seen on comparable stones. Robert Cochrane had documented the slab earlier still, including a drawn record in his survey of Glendalough's ecclesiastical remains published in 1925 as part of a report by the Commissioners of Public Works, meaning the stone was already recognised as worth careful recording by the early twentieth century.

The slab is now part of the exhibition display at the Glendalough Visitor Centre, where it can be seen at close range rather than encountered in the open air. That indoor setting makes the incised lines easier to read than they might otherwise be, and the looped terminal at the cross's head, easy to overlook in a photograph, becomes more legible when viewed directly.