One of them, now known as the South cross, spent an unknown period lying beneath the ground south of the cathedral before it was unearthed in 1954. By around 2006, the surviving shaft had been moved indoors to the north-west corner of the sacristy, a small room adjoining the chancel, to protect it from further weathering. The effect is quietly disorienting: a fragment of carved stone that once stood in open air, orienting itself to east and west, now faces south and north, its original compass bearings quietly reversed by the move.

The cross is fragmentary, the head long gone, but the shaft, standing at just under two metres and tapering as it rises, carries enough ornament to reward close attention. Peter Harbison's survey from 1992 describes the original east face, now facing south, as bearing a horizontal panel of Stafford knots, an interlaced geometric motif, below a panel of closer-meshed interlace near the top of the shaft. The original west face has a circular interlace device near the top, while the sides are left plain. At the base of each carved face, the roll moulding along the edge curls inward into a small spiral, a detail easy to miss but characteristic of the careful finish applied even to a piece that would later end up underground. The cross was one of six such monuments at Kilfenora originally, all carved in the local limestone. One was removed to Killaloe in 1821, and four others remain at the cathedral site alongside this one.

The South cross sits inside the roofed sacristy section of Kilfenora Cathedral, which is otherwise a partially ruined medieval structure. The indoor setting means the carved surfaces are sheltered and relatively legible, though the reorientation of the shaft means any description keyed to east and west faces requires a small mental adjustment when you are standing in front of it.