The improvised fixings are oddly touching given the age and care of the carving they secure.

The slab itself is tapered, measuring roughly 1.57 metres tall by 0.58 metres wide, and its surface carries an incised design of some refinement. A two-line border frames a triple-line cross, the arms of which terminate not in simple points but in half-circle expansions, with a circular motif at the centre where the arms meet. This type of decoration, in which the cross terminals swell outward into rounded or cup-shaped forms, is characteristic of Early Christian stonework in Ireland, a period broadly spanning the fifth to twelfth centuries when monastic communities like Glendalough were producing some of the island's most distinctive carved work. The site at Glendalough, sometimes called Sevenchurches after the cluster of ecclesiastical ruins there, was described and documented by Robert Cochrane in his detailed architectural survey published in 1925, drawing on work recorded in the Eightieth Annual Report of the Commissioners of Public Works in Ireland for 1911 to 1912. Harold Leask, writing in 1950, noted the slab's dimensions and described its incised border and cross in terms that remain the standard record of the piece.