It is not decorated in any elaborate way, and it makes no grand claims on the eye. What it is, precisely, is a rough slab of mica schist, a dark and slightly glittering metamorphic rock common to the Wicklow uplands, measuring just under a metre tall and forty centimetres wide, with a Latin cross carved into its face in slight relief.

The slab was documented by Patrick Healy in 1972, as part of a supplementary survey of ancient monuments at Glendalough carried out for the Office of Public Works. Healy recorded it as 0.93 metres by 0.4 metres, and only 0.07 metres thick, which gives a sense of how slender and unassuming the thing actually is. The Latin cross, with its characteristically longer lower arm, sits in low relief on the surface, meaning it projects only just above the surrounding stone rather than being incised into it. Cross-slabs of this kind are among the quieter survivals of early medieval Irish monasticism, used to mark graves or sacred boundaries, their carving often plain and functional rather than ornate. The Sevenchurches site, as Glendalough's monastic enclosure is sometimes called in reference to its several ecclesiastical buildings, contains a number of such modest markers alongside its more photographed monuments.