It is small, heavily worn, and easy to overlook: only the cross head survives, measuring roughly 64 centimetres high and 30 centimetres across at the centre, its carved figure now so eroded that only the long robes and feet of the relief figure remain legible. Yet behind that weathered stone is a tradition linking it to a French noblewoman, a faithless Irish lord, and an act of public grief dressed up as piety.

When the antiquarian William Mason visited Tullaroan in 1819, he found two limestone crosses standing at the crossroads, both attributed to the Grace family, a prominent Kilkenny dynasty. One bore a relief of Christ; the other showed a female figure in long drapery, identified as either the Virgin or a female saint. It was this second cross that carried the more unusual story. According to local tradition, a French lady of high rank had followed a member of the Grace family from France, only to discover on arrival that he was already married. She built the cross, Mason was told, as much to reproach his inconstancy as to express her own resigned piety. By 1839, when Ordnance Survey researchers recorded the site, both crosses had been broken, probably sometime in the intervening two decades. The broken fragments were described in some detail: the lower shaft standing about 0.8 metres high, the upper portion around 0.5 metres, with only part of one arm remaining and a worn representation of the Crucifixion still visible. The same fragments appear to have been noted again by Carrigan around 1905, suggesting nothing much changed in the interval. The surviving cross head, now set into a roughly square limestone base, is thought most likely to be the remains of the cross bearing the female figure, which would make it the one connected to that tradition of romantic disappointment and public reproach.