Lying along the line of the long-vanished west wall of Templehouse hall-house in County Sligo, it is a cross-base, the socket-stone that would have anchored a freestanding high cross. The mortise-hole cut into its upper surface, roughly 30 centimetres by 22 centimetres and 20 centimetres deep, is surrounded by a low plain rim, and the block itself tapers gently from its wider base toward that rectangular top. High crosses were among the most ambitious expressions of early medieval ecclesiastical life in Ireland, tall carved monuments typically raised at monastic sites as markers of sanctity and jurisdiction. This one never regained its cross, or if it did, nothing of the upright has survived.

The shape and proportions of the stone are consistent with cross-bases dating to before 1200, placing its origins somewhere in the early medieval period. A tradition recorded by T. O'Rorke in 1878 adds a folk layer to the archaeology: local people of the district apparently called it a Holy Water Stone, suggesting the block had never quite lost its sacred association in popular memory even after the cross itself disappeared. More intriguing still is the suggestion, raised in a 1985 to 1986 study by C. J. Lynn, that the cross may be connected to a Knights Templar foundation at Templehouse, a military-religious order that held properties across Ireland during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. If that connection is real, no other physical trace of a Templar presence here has been identified, which leaves the cross-base as the sole possible remnant of something that, if it existed at all, has otherwise vanished entirely from the landscape.