That particular fate, practical and indifferent, captures something of the uncertainty that still hangs over the object. It is recorded as a cross, and it may well be one, but the locals who knew it best had a different explanation entirely: to them, it was simply the shaft of the brewery scales.

The shaft is octagonal, flat-topped, and measures 2.5 metres in length. It once stood upright near a roadside, set into a square graduated pedestal, and was associated with property belonging to the Martyn family, who owned both a house and a brewery in the area. A gale brought it down, the fall breaking it in two, and one half was promptly put to work blocking a gap, as broken stone so often is in the Irish countryside. When researcher Holt documented it in the early twentieth century, he described it as a tall slender pillar of cut limestone and recorded the local tradition about the scales. By the time Gosling examined it in March 1983, both the base and shaft were lying together on the ground. Gosling proposed a 16th or 17th century date and suggested it may have served as a wayside or market cross, the kind of roadside monument that once marked routes, parish boundaries, or places of trade. A wayside cross of that period would typically have been a simple upright stone, sometimes carved, sometimes plain, its religious function as much about marking territory and safe passage as devotion. The flat top of this shaft, however, gives some pause; a cross head, if there ever was one, has left no obvious trace, and the brewery scales theory, however prosaic, cannot be entirely dismissed.