Both its arms are broken, and its surface carries no carvings, no knotwork, no inscriptions. The only decoration, if it can be called that, consists of circular hollows cut into the angles where the arms meet the shaft, a detail so restrained it is easy to miss entirely. For a site as well-visited as Glendalough, this wayside cross is easy to walk past without registering what it is.

The cross belongs to the monastic landscape historically known as Sevenchurches, the Irish name Gleann Dá Loch meaning the valley of the two lakes. Wayside crosses of this type served as boundary markers, stations for prayer, or points along processional routes within and around early medieval monastic enclosures. Harold Leask, the architectural historian whose 1950 study of Irish churches and round towers remains a key reference for the period, noted this cross and recorded its form, including a drawing that documents its appearance in the early twentieth century, made at a time when Robert Cochrane was surveying the ecclesiastical remains at Glendalough for the Commissioners of Public Works. That survey was published in 1925, drawing on work from around 1911 to 1912, and provides one of the more thorough early records of the site's fabric. The cross is a protected National Monument in state ownership.