It is not a cross, not an inscription, not anything obviously legible. It is a fragment, roughly 77 centimetres by 40 centimetres, of mica schist, the silvery metamorphic rock common to this part of Wicklow. What makes it worth pausing over is a detail on one face: a shallow rebate, and cut through that rebated surface, a small rectangular perforation measuring just 6 centimetres by 4 centimetres. That precise, deliberate cutting suggests this was once part of something functional and considered, not merely decorative rubble.

Patrick Healy, writing in an unpublished Office of Public Works survey of Glendalough monuments in 1972, proposed that the fragment may have been a projecting stone from above a doorway, of the kind still visible at the west doorway of St Kevin's Church elsewhere on the same site. Such stones, sometimes called lintels or hood elements depending on their position, were cut to channel rainwater away from an entrance or to carry a structural load, and the rebate and perforation on this piece would be consistent with that kind of fitted, jointed stonework. Healy assigned it the number 194 in his catalogue, and it remains in the area of the graveyard it occupied when he recorded it, lying immediately south of a graveslab he also catalogued, near the Moloney high-cross-style headstone and graveplot roughly 44 metres south-south-west of the round tower.

Finding it requires a little navigation among the graves. The Moloney headstone, carved in the manner of a high cross, serves as a useful landmark; the graveslab is about 8 metres to its north-east, and the fragment lies just beyond that. It is easy to walk past without registering what it is, which is perhaps fitting for a piece whose original position and purpose have never been fully confirmed.