The arms of the cross reach to the very edges of the stone, and the centre is slightly expanded, giving it a subtle visual weight that a casual glance might miss entirely. It is not the kind of monument that announces itself.

The slab belongs to a pair catalogued by the architectural historian Harold Leask in 1950, who described this particular example as narrower than its companion and noted its position relative to the church wall with careful precision. The site sits within the Glendalough monastic complex, one of the great early medieval ecclesiastical settlements of Ireland, founded in the sixth century and associated with St Kevin. Sevenchurches is the name sometimes applied to the valley and its scatter of ruined buildings, and St Mary's Church is among the structures that survive there in various states of decay. Drawings of the slab were reproduced in a report compiled by Robert Cochrane and published in 1925, drawn from the Eightieth Annual Report of the Commissioners of Public Works in Ireland covering 1911 to 1912, suggesting that even a century ago it was considered worth documenting in some detail.