It is not where it was made, not where it was first moved, and the cross-head it was presumably designed to carry is long gone. What remains is a shaft, 1.47 metres tall, carved with a density of imagery that repays close looking: interlace knotwork, crouching lions, a trapped deer, a crozier-carrying horseman on a prancing horse, and two figures whose hair braids together between their heads.

The shaft originally stood at Banagher, though it is also associated with the nearby townland of Kylebeg. According to the architectural historian Peter Harbison, it was removed by someone named Cooke sometime around the middle of the nineteenth century, the circumstances of which are not recorded. After Cooke's death it was moved to Clonmacnois, the great early medieval monastic site on the Shannon, around 1870, before being transferred to the National Museum in Dublin in 1929. The carving is in sandstone and covers all four faces in panels of varying sizes, each framed by small roll moulding, the rounded ridge-like border common to Insular stone carving of the early medieval period. The damage visible on two of the upper side panels was probably caused by a later attempt to fit a ring, the circular halo-like element that defines the ringed high cross form, suggesting someone tried at some point to retrofit the shaft into a more conventional cross shape. A shallow mortise-hole on top may be evidence of the same impulse.

The shaft is on display at the National Museum of Ireland on Kildare Street in Dublin city centre. It is a modest object in scale, easily overlooked among larger exhibits, but the carving is unusually varied. The panel showing a horseman with a crozier, his legs thrust forward and his horse mid-prance, sits alongside a panel of four human figures whose limbs knot together in a composition that is simultaneously decorative and figural. On the sides, animal heads terminate strands of interlace with their mouths, biting the very patterns they emerge from. The museum is free to enter, and the shaft can be examined at close range.