The square socket cut into its upper face, roughly 23 centimetres to a side and 14 centimetres deep, is the most telling detail: it was made to receive the tenon of a standing cross, and that cross is gone. What remains is essentially a plinth without its subject, a base whose purpose is legible only once you know what to look for.

The site at Oughtmama is an early medieval monastic complex, and the cross base belongs to its outer enclosure, the outermost of the concentric boundaries that would once have defined the sacred territory of the settlement. Such enclosures, sometimes marked by earthen banks or stone walls, separated the monastic precinct from the secular world beyond. The base itself is modest in scale, measuring one metre in length and just under a metre wide, though only 20 centimetres thick. At some point before its current position was recorded, it was noted as lying just north of the central church, suggesting it may have been moved or disturbed at some earlier date. Whether the cross it once supported was removed, broken, or simply lost to time is not known.