What gives this one at Ballyclery a quiet strangeness is the care taken in its making and placing. The southeast face and sides of the slab have been carefully dressed, the stone worked smooth, while the northwest face is left entirely rough and unfinished, as though the maker knew precisely which direction mattered and had no interest in the rest. It carries the INRI inscription on its finished face and bears the date 1820, cemented into a stepped plinth of limestone blocks.

The plinth itself sits on the southeastern edge of a small cairn, a low mound of gathered stones roughly six and a half metres east to west and about a metre high. Cairns of this kind often mark ancient or sacred ground, and the proximity here is telling: the cross stands only about five metres from a holy well. Holy wells in Ireland were sites of pre-Christian veneration that the church gradually absorbed into its own devotional landscape, and placing a dated cross beside one in 1820 continues a pattern of layering that stretches back centuries. The deliberate orientation of the dressed face toward the southeast, toward the well, suggests the cross was positioned not simply as a marker but in relationship to it, the two features intended to be read together across a short stretch of ground.