Known as St Vallery's Cross, it measures just under one and a half metres in height, with a circular head and chamfered edges, the kind of early medieval stone carving that tends to accumulate more questions than answers over the centuries. What makes it particularly arresting is the carving on its west face: a naked figure of Christ, head inclined to the right, rendered with an directness that feels unusual even by the standards of early Irish stone crosses. Turn to the east face and the imagery shifts again, to two apparently bearded human heads carved in relief at the centre, one of them possibly wearing a mitre, the liturgical headdress associated with bishops. Two further worn heads appear elsewhere on the cross, one on the lower southern edge of the cross-head and another on the northeast side of the base.

The cross is associated with an ecclesiastical site, though the precise nature and extent of that site remains unclear. The Ordnance Survey Letters, compiled in the nineteenth century by John O'Flanagan and others, recorded an octagonal limestone font somewhere in the vicinity, but no trace of it has been found in its supposed original location. A simple circular basin cut into a small granite block does survive immediately south of the nearby Fassaroe Castle, and this is believed to be the font, relocated at some point from the cross's immediate surroundings. Archaeological test excavations carried out in 2002 directly beside the cross found nothing of significance beneath the surface, which deepens rather than resolves the uncertainty about what kind of religious community, if any, once gathered here. The scholar Ó hÉailidhe documented the carved heads in 1958, and the cross has been a protected national monument since a preservation order was made in 1935.