The western face is completely plain. The contrast is quietly arresting. The cross is of Latin form, meaning it has a longer shaft than arms, and it was cut from a single block of sandstone, measuring just 0.67 metres high and 0.28 metres wide. The arms are short, the left badly damaged, and the shaft splays slightly towards the base, while the top terminal splays outward to a noticeably greater degree. Despite its modest size, the quality of the carving points to a skilled hand.

Small Latin stone crosses of this general type began appearing as grave markers around the twelfth century and continued in use into the nineteenth, so form alone does not fix a date. What makes this one potentially much older is its context. The cross stands near the site of an earlier church that once occupied the eastern section of the same graveyard, recorded as a rectangular structure on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842 and marked simply as "site of Chapel". A font elsewhere in the graveyard is also thought to belong to this earlier ecclesiastical settlement. Specialists have noted that when a stone cross of this type is found associated with an early medieval site, and when its decorative features find parallels with other cruciform stones of that period, the combination can help push the date of the monument back considerably. John Sheehan, a scholar who examined the cross in person, concluded in 2019 that it most likely belongs to the early medieval period, a span running roughly from the fifth to the twelfth century in an Irish context. The concentric circle motif on the crosshead is consistent with that reading, a form of ornament with deep roots in Irish stone carving long before the Norman arrival reshaped the country's material culture.