It is of the type of the standing stones of Galloway, the earliest Christian monuments of the Celtic people, and was chosen as a link with Scotland, the land of Ruskin's fore-elders.

Upon one side is incised a Chi-Rho enclosed in a circle after the fashion of the earliest crosses, with the following inscription beneath from Deucalion, Lecture xii., par.

[4]On the other side of the monolith, facing the lake which Ruskin once described "as one of the three most beautiful scenes in Europe,"[5] there is a medallion in bronze, the work of Signor Lucchesi, representing Ruskin in profile as he was in the early 1870s, when he composed Fors Clavigera and was Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Oxford.

vxii:The first thing which I remember, as an event in life, was being taken by my nurse to the brow of Friar's Crag on Derwent Water.

Ruskin wrote that "all monuments to individuals are, to a certain extent, triumphant; therefore, they must not be placed where nature has no elevation of character.