It is crude in the best sense of that word, roughly worked rather than decoratively finished, measuring just 0.8 metres tall and 0.33 metres wide. The form is simple: a rectangular lower shaft topped by a rounded head, that upper portion measuring 0.27 metres high and 0.26 metres across. There is no inscription recorded, no hagiographic carving, no elaborate knotwork. It is a stone cross in its most reduced form, and that plainness is part of what makes it worth attention.

Circular graveyards of this kind are often considered among the oldest sacred enclosures in the Irish landscape, their rounded boundaries thought to pre-date the grid logic of later medieval ecclesiastical planning and sometimes enclosing sites of early Christian or even earlier significance. The Ballymaghroe example is not alone in its enclosure. Two further objects were identified within the same graveyard: a second cross and a font, the latter being a stone basin used to hold holy water, typically associated with early church sites. Together, these three finds suggest the graveyard preserves the remnants of a small ecclesiastical settlement whose precise origins remain unrecorded.