The cross that once rose from it is gone entirely, and the explanation given in the scholarship is an arresting one: the cross was reportedly stolen and lost at sea. A broken shaft socket, measuring roughly 23 by 29 centimetres with its southern side damaged, is all that physically records the scale of what once stood here.

Ahenny is already well regarded for its surviving high crosses, those large, elaborately carved Early Christian monuments that are among the finest of their type in Ireland, characterised by intricate interlace and figurative panels. The site holds at least two intact examples standing to the northwest and southwest of this empty base, and a later medieval church lies around thirty metres to the north. The base itself is modest: roughly 68 by 66 centimetres across and only 20 centimetres high, unremarkable in itself until one considers that it once anchored something tall and carved and significant enough to be worth stealing. The detail comes from Maurice Craig and the Knight of Glin, writing in 1970, and whether the theft was an act of iconoclasm, opportunism, or something more deliberate, the record does not say.

The graveyard remains an active or at least maintained space, enclosed by a stone wall and set within gently rolling upland terrain. Visitors who come for the famous standing crosses may pass this base without registering what it represents: not a ruin in the usual sense, but an absence with a specific and rather unlikely history attached to it.