It is modest in every dimension: just under half a metre tall, roughly as wide, and barely four centimetres thick. What makes it quietly remarkable is the cross carved into its eastern face, a broad, slightly raised form picked out by parallel grooved lines, each groove about a centimetre wide and half a centimetre deep. The shaft and arms are each around ten centimetres across. Partially damaged, and apparently never formally recorded before its documentation in 2012, it is the kind of object that rewards a second look.

Cross-slabs are among the most common early medieval monument types found at Irish ecclesiastical sites. They range from elaborately decorated high crosses down to plain incised stones like this one, and they served a variety of purposes including grave markers, boundary indicators, and devotional focal points within monastic enclosures. The Sevenchurches site, known in Irish as Na Seacht dTeampaill, is the western of Glendalough's two principal monastic zones, and it preserves a concentration of early Christian remains including the roofless nave of St Kevin's Church and the round tower that stands just to the north of this slab. Round towers, tall tapering stone structures built from around the ninth century onwards, functioned as bell towers and places of refuge within Irish monasteries. That this small slab has stood within three metres of one, evidently unnoticed in any formal record until relatively recently, says something about how much can remain overlooked even at well-visited sites.