Seven of them face the same direction; the eighth, tucked into the lower corner of the northern panel, turns the opposite way. It is a small, quietly eccentric detail on a monument that is otherwise given over almost entirely to interlace, spirals, and domed bosses, and it sits on a cross that was itself once broken deliberately, then reassembled by a blind craftsman from Faugheen named Paddy Laurence in 1858. That restoration alone would be enough to distinguish the West Cross of Kilkieran.

The cross stands on the lower south-facing slope of Kilmacoliver Hill, within the graveyard associated with the early medieval monastery of Kilkieran, overlooking the valley of the River Suir in County Kilkenny. It is a large piece of work: 2.45 metres tall, with arms spanning just over a metre, set on a stepped rectangular base whose middle riser is itself ornamented with interlace. A beehive-shaped capstone sits at the top, flat on its upper surface and bearing a faint incised horizontal line near its base. The thick rope-moulding that defines the edge of the cross recurs across almost every surface, framing panels of close-meshed interlace, six-spiral motifs, and, on the lower west shaft, pairs of animals crossing at the neck with a small cross placed at the centre of the composition. The scholar Helen Roe suggested a date in the eighth century for the Kilkieran crosses, placing them among the earlier examples of the Irish high cross tradition, in which free-standing carved stone crosses, often ringed and richly decorated, served as focal points for monastic communities. Carrigan, writing in 1905, noted that the cross had been maliciously broken "long ago" before Paddy Laurence undertook its repair, though the precise circumstances of the damage were apparently already lost to memory by then.

The cross sits around four metres north-west of the ruined church within Kilkieran graveyard, and there are further high crosses nearby on the same site. The variety of decorative treatment across the different faces rewards patient looking; the west face retains all five of its domed bosses, while the east face has lost the outer moulding and boss from the lower arm, making the two sides subtly asymmetrical in a way that is easy to miss at a glance.