It is not large, just under two metres tall and little more than half a metre wide, and at only seven centimetres thick it has something almost fragile about it. What makes it worth pausing over is the cross carved into its face: a Latin cross with rounded angles and arms that flare gently outward toward their ends, the lines incised with enough care and confidence to suggest someone who knew exactly what they were doing.

The slab was catalogued by Patrick Healy in a 1972 Office of Public Works survey of ancient monuments at Glendalough, where it appeared as number 172 in his list, noted as standing to the east of the Priest's House. The Priest's House itself is a small Romanesque structure within the main monastic enclosure, its name a later folk designation rather than a record of its original function. Cross-slabs of this kind, upright stones bearing incised or relief crosses, were a common feature of early medieval Irish monasteries, used variously as grave markers, boundary indicators, or devotional objects. The material here, mica schist, is a metamorphic rock with a faintly glittering, layered quality, common to the geology of the Wicklow uplands, which means this particular stone was almost certainly shaped from local material. The combination of expanding arms and a rounded treatment of the angles is a decorative convention seen elsewhere in early Christian stonework, though pinning down a precise date for an uninscribed slab like this is difficult without additional evidence.

The slab stands just over three metres to the east-northeast of the Priest's House's north-east corner, close to another recorded monument. Glendalough draws considerable visitor numbers to its round tower and cathedral ruins, and smaller, less immediately dramatic stones like this one can easily be passed without a second glance. Knowing to look for it, and understanding what the expanding arms and incised outline actually represent in terms of craft and intention, changes the encounter considerably.