What was once a wayside cross near Ballyknock church in County Kilkenny, erected on a graduated stone plinth a little to the south of the building, was at some point thrown into the adjacent mill-stream, from where Canon Moore, the parish priest of Johnstown, retrieved it and moved it to the relative safety of the graveyard, where it now rests beside the south wall of the chancel. The cross itself is gone; what remains is the sculptured base, and the story it carries is more legible in stone than in any surviving text.

Writing in 1905, the historian Carrigan recorded what could still be read on the base. One face bears a heraldic shield showing the arms of De Frayne impaling those of Fitzgerald, a form of display in which two family coats of arms are combined side by side to indicate a marriage alliance. At the base of the stone are the initials R.F. and E.G. Carrigan concluded from this that the cross was commissioned by the same woman responsible for the De Frayne tomb in the parish church, connecting the two monuments through shared patronage. Of whatever inscription once ran around or across the stone, only a single word remained legible when Carrigan examined it: Orate, the Latin imperative meaning "pray", the standard opening of a memorial plea for the soul of the deceased. It is a common formula on medieval funerary monuments in Ireland, but here it is all that is left of a longer text that time and water have erased entirely.