Or it may be gone entirely. The uncertainty is itself part of the record: when investigators looked into it in 1981, the cross was not marked on any Ordnance Survey map, and a local woman could offer only that she had heard tell that the like was there long ago. That faint, secondhand memory is, for now, as close as anyone has come to placing it.

The more detailed account comes from the Ordnance Survey Letters, the remarkable series of field notes compiled by OS officers in the nineteenth century as they travelled Ireland documenting place names and antiquities. Those letters describe a cross on Mullach an tSleibhe, an Irish place name meaning something like the summit or ridge of the mountain, situated near the Newbristy schoolhouse. The cross, according to that account, was regularly visited by people performing stations, a form of devotional practice in which participants move between fixed points, often outdoor crosses or holy wells, repeating prayers at each. The schoolhouse itself sits on the boundary between the townlands of Ballymorin and Tobercormick, which places the cross somewhere in that margin between two named territories, a liminal position that would not be unusual for a site of this kind.

The precise location of the cross remains unknown, and any coordinates attached to it today are acknowledged to be indicative only. It is the kind of monument that exists more fully in documentary traces than on the ground, a pencilled note on a map, a passage in a nineteenth-century letter, a phrase half-remembered by a woman who had only ever heard about it from someone else.