That small detail, a steps and shaft recorded on Hardiman's map of Limerick around 1590, is now one of the only pieces of evidence that this structure ever stood on the south side of the cathedral at all.

Market crosses were practical objects as much as religious ones. Typically erected at the commercial centre of a medieval town, they marked the spot where trade was officially sanctioned, disputes could be settled, and civic life played out in public. Limerick's example may be the cross referred to in thirteenth-century documents, which would place its origins in the period when the city was developing as a significant Anglo-Norman urban centre. The connection between that documentary reference and the remnant shown on Hardiman's map, made around three centuries later, is noted by O'Flaherty in a 2010 study of the site, though it remains a possibility rather than a certainty. By the time the map was drawn, only the steps and shaft appear to have remained, suggesting the cross head itself was already long gone.

The cathedral in question is St Mary's Cathedral, which still stands in the older part of the city, and the area to its south is accessible on foot without difficulty. There is nothing to see of the market cross itself today; no stone, no plaque marks the spot with any certainty. What the site offers instead is a prompt to think about the layers of activity that once made this part of Limerick a working medieval streetscape, where a worn set of steps around a stone shaft would have been as ordinary and functional as a town hall or a weighing house. Anyone with an interest in the documentary and cartographic evidence can follow it up through the Sites and Monuments Record entry referenced in O'Flaherty's work.