What remains is a stump, partially collapsed and overgrown, its edges chamfered in the manner of dressed stonework, rising just over sixty centimetres from a two-tiered base. The whole structure measures roughly a metre and a third across at its widest point. It is the kind of thing that could easily be walked past, or mistaken for a boundary marker, or simply forgotten.

Local tradition holds that after the Famine, a priest used the cross as an outdoor altar, one of the so-called "stations" where Mass was celebrated in the open air, a practice with deep roots in Irish Catholic life during and after the Penal era, when public worship was prohibited and congregations gathered at improvised sites in the landscape. That this particular stone was pressed into that use, perhaps in the late 1840s or early 1850s, gives it a specific gravity that its modest appearance does not immediately suggest. There is also a cartographic curiosity attached to it: on the 1837 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, the feature appears to have been labelled as a Holy Well, a category quite different from a cross-shaft, and a misidentification that was noted by McCaffrey in 1952. Whether that error reflects genuine local ambiguity about what the structure was, or simply a surveyor's guess, is not recorded.