It had been seen as recently as 1838, when the scholar John O'Donovan noted it during the Ordnance Survey Letters, leaning unfixed against a small section of wall to the south-east of the old church. After that, it simply vanished from record, buried in the ground with roughly a third of its shaft swallowed up, until it was rediscovered in 2000 about twenty-five metres from the church. It now sits in a glass-fronted display case inside the ruined building, where it has been ever since.

The cross is carved from a single substantial stone slab, with a long shaft and unusually short arms set very close to the top, giving it a distinctly elongated profile. At the base is a small tang, a projecting peg of stone, suggesting it was always intended to sit in a separate supporting base rather than stand freely. One face carries a figure of the crucified Christ rendered in what specialists describe as a simple or primitive style, though the carving is precise in its own way: the head is turned at a slight angle, the eyes, nose and mouth are clearly readable, and a crown of thorns is indicated by a ring of small chevrons. The body is carefully observed, with gentle modelling at the elbows, knees and ribcage, a faint loincloth, and hands and feet shown in some detail, each hand pierced by a round-headed nail, the overlapping feet fixed with a single nail. An INRI inscription at the top was still legible when O'Donovan saw it; it is now almost entirely weathered away. The opposite face is perhaps the more unusual: at the intersection of the arms and shaft, the Instruments of the Crucifixion are carved in low relief, showing a claw hammer, a pliers or vice, and a whip. These arma Christi, the tools used at the Passion, appear in Irish devotional carving from the medieval period onwards but became particularly associated with Penal Era piety, and the style of the whole cross points to an eighteenth-century date. The Penal Era refers to the period when Catholic practice in Ireland was legally suppressed, and small, locally made devotional objects of this kind often substituted for more public forms of worship that were no longer possible.