The structure acquired a rubble base, assembled by hand, not to preserve it but to make it look more important, which is itself a quietly telling act. Its Irish name, Crois-gar, simply means the little cross, and that diminutive seems to have followed it through the centuries.

The cross was identified in the 1850s, at which point observers noted it was evidently very old, while the rubble plinth beneath it was acknowledged as modern construction. Writing around that time, the Reverend James Graves proposed that the cross may originally have served as a gable cross, the decorative or devotional stone set at the apex of a church roofline, belonging to the medieval church at Ballycallan. That church, along with its associated graveyard, lies roughly a kilometre to the north-west of where the cross now stands. How or when it came to be separated from the building, if Graves's suggestion is correct, is not recorded. The cross appears on the revised edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, indicating that by the mid-nineteenth century it was already considered a feature worth noting in the landscape, small as it was.