Yet that is roughly the history attached to the Donagh cross in County Monaghan, a seventeenth-century carved stone that was only brought back into the open in 1911, when it was unearthed from within the remains of the Old Church on the site. It was subsequently set into a concrete base in the north-west corner of the graveyard, where it now stands just over a metre and a half tall.

The cross is a solid-ringed type, meaning the ring connecting the arms is fully filled rather than open, and measures 1.4 metres in height with a span of 0.9 metres. One face is plain, but the east face carries a crucifixion carved in false relief, a technique in which the figure is modelled by cutting away the surrounding stone rather than projecting outward. A sunburst motif runs around the ring encircling the scene. Along the tapering shaft there is a carved inscription, though it is now so heavily encrusted with lichen as to be entirely illegible. Just below the feet of the crucifixion figure, the numeral '6' is still visible, and this is thought to relate to the original date of erection, either 1606 or 1636. The carving style of that single digit matches closely with other seventeenth-century numerals found elsewhere in the same graveyard. Local tradition holds that the cross was recovered from a bog, where it had been concealed for safe keeping, and that it may originally have served as the market cross of the old village of Glaslough, which stood in the nearby townland of Tullyree. Separated from the cross head at the opposite end of the graveyard, in the south-east quadrant, sits what is considered its probable original base. That stone is known locally as the Wart Well, suggesting it acquired a folk healing function somewhere in the long gap between the cross being hidden and its rediscovery.