The shaft is broken, one arm is gone, and the ring, the solid circular halo of stone that once joined the arms, survives only in part. What remains stands roughly half a metre tall. It is a fragment, clearly, but a legible one: on one face, raised capital letters spell out what appears to be a memorial inscription, partially deciphered as IHS ORA PRO ANIMA IOAN, the Latin phrase meaning "pray for the soul of Ioan," followed by letters that resist confident reading. A sketched record of the inscription also places the date 1650 near the base of the head.

The cross was drawn in the nineteenth century by George Victor Du Noyer, a prolific recorder of Irish antiquities whose field sketches captured many monuments now altered or lost. By 1928, the published description noted four lines of five letters each still partially legible, and placed the cross on the roadside near the National School, two miles north of Fore. Fore itself is well known for its early medieval remains, and the Carpenterstown cross fits into that broader landscape of roadside devotional monuments. Ninety metres to the north lies the site of a chapel recorded as Templefanum, a name combining the Latin templum and fanum, both meaning a sacred or religious site, which suggests this stretch of road has carried some devotional significance for centuries. A ring cross of this type, where the arms are connected by a circle of stone, is a form associated in Ireland with both early medieval and later wayside monuments, though the 1650 date here places this example firmly in the post-medieval period.

The cross sits on the east side of the road, set into a large rectangular socketed base, roughly 0.54 metres by 0.53 metres, with a deep rectangular socket cut into its upper surface. The socket is considerably wider than the remaining shaft, which tells us the original shaft tapered downward to fit it. The inscription face looks to have been in English rather than Latin for the bulk of its text, though weathering and loss of letters on the right side make the full reading elusive. Visitors arriving from Fore will find it approximately two miles north, near where the National School once stood.