It is an easy thing to walk past without a second thought, and yet the 1837 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map records a cross standing here, positioned to the south-west of two holy wells, with a third well lying just to its west. Holy wells are springs or water sources associated with local saints or pre-Christian sacred practice, and they attracted patterns, the Irish term for pilgrimages carried out on particular feast days, often involving circuits of prayer around the well, a cross, or a cairn of stones.

The OS Letters, a series of notes compiled by Ordnance Survey officers in the 1830s and later published by O'Flanagan in 1927, describe the site plainly: a cross and a heap of stones near the holy wells, at which pilgrims pray. That phrasing suggests the cross and the cairn functioned together as prayer stations within a wider devotional landscape, one that centred on the trio of wells nearby. By the time the map was revised in 1933, the cross had gone. The cartographers noted its absence by appending the words "Site of" to the record, a small typographic gesture that marks the difference between a living place and a remembered one. What removed the cross, and when exactly it disappeared, is not known.