The south-facing terminal of its south arm alone contains four figurative panels whose subjects remain genuinely contested: what one researcher reads as Salome dancing, another leaves unresolved; what one sees as St John the Baptist embracing Christ, another interprets as Jacob wrestling with the angel; and the bottom right scene is claimed variously as the beheading of John the Baptist or David and the lion. The cross is a high cross, a form of free-standing ringed cross carved in early medieval Ireland, and this one, standing 2.15 metres tall on its stepped base, is still without its capstone, a tenon at the top indicating that one was always intended.

The site takes its name from Cill Ruidhche, named for St Ruidhche, a female saint commemorated on the 8th of February, according to the historian Carrigan writing in 1905. The cross itself is carved from sandstone and covered almost entirely in ornament. The east and west faces of the cross head each carry a large domed boss ringed with interlace and contained by roll moulding. Beneath the roundel on the west face sits a horizontal panel read by Harbison in 1992 as the Adoration of the Magi, and by Richardson and Scarry in 1990 as Daniel in the lion's den. The arms of the west face carry bosses wrapped in spiral coils; those on the east face show a hunting scene and a procession of horses. Down the shaft, the carving shifts register entirely, moving through fretwork, fret-spirals, interlace, and geometric patterns of circles and squares, though much of it is now worn to near-illegibility. Fifty metres to the east and north-east stand a pre-Romanesque church and a round tower, a tower of the tapered, mortared-stone type built in early Christian Ireland, typically as a bell tower and place of refuge. Together, they suggest a monastic complex of some significance, though the cross is the piece that has absorbed most of the scholarly attention, and not yet settled it.