Set into the western bank of a rural road near Monaseed in County Wexford, the visible portion amounts to little more than 0.6 metres of square-cut granite, with the arms spreading just 0.7 metres. The cross is of Latin type, meaning it has a longer vertical shaft than horizontal arms, and the exposed head measures roughly 22 by 21 centimetres. What it lacks in scale it more than makes up for in documentary longevity.

The cross appears by name in the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, one of the great land surveys carried out under Cromwellian administration to catalogue Irish landholdings after the wars of the 1640s. There it is recorded as the stone cross of Ballie Lis, serving as a fixed point on the boundary between Gorey Barony and Killinhugh parish. That a wayside cross, a type of roadside or field marker common throughout medieval Ireland and often associated with routes of prayer or pilgrimage, was being used to define administrative and ecclesiastical boundaries suggests it was already a well-established landmark by the mid-seventeenth century. The cross sits in a slight col, a shallow saddle or dip, on a north-south ridge spur, which would have made it a natural and visible reference point for anyone navigating or surveying the surrounding land.