Originally located in an old graveyard, the cross has since been removed to the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin, leaving its original site without the marker that once defined it. This kind of displacement is not unusual for early Christian stonework, which has a long history of being relocated, repurposed, or simply lost, but it means that the graveyard at Cartron is quietly missing a piece of its own identity.

The cross is believed to be of early Christian date, a period roughly spanning the fifth to the twelfth centuries in Ireland, during which plain undecorated crosses were commonly erected at ecclesiastical and burial sites. What makes the Cartron example slightly more interesting is that it was not alone; a second plain cross of similar character was found in the same graveyard. Both are recorded by the scholar John Higgins, whose 1987 study of Irish crosses catalogued this one with a plate reference. The two crosses together suggest that the graveyard at Cartron was once a site of some local religious significance, even if very little of that presence survives above ground today.