The cross itself is largely gone, but the mortise, the square socket cut to receive and hold the upright shaft, remains, and the butt of the shaft is still lodged inside it, as if someone simply walked away mid-repair centuries ago. What survives is less a monument than an anatomy lesson in how these stone crosses were built: base, socket, shaft, each element distinct and replaceable.

Patrick Healy, surveying ancient monuments at Glendalough for the Office of Public Works in 1972, recorded the piece with careful precision. The base measures 0.68 metres by 0.5 metres and stands just 0.14 metres high, and the fragment of shaft still sitting in the mortise is 0.32 metres by 0.13 metres. The material is mica-schist, a locally available metamorphic rock with a slightly glittering, layered quality. Healy placed the cross at roughly 2.25 metres west of the south-west corner of the nave of the nearby church. Glendalough was one of the great early medieval monastic centres of Ireland, and the landscape around it is thick with ancillary remains, outlying churches, carved stones, and enclosures that extend well beyond the more visited monastic core. This fragment at Lugduff belongs to that wider scatter.