One side shows a robed figure, arms bent at the elbow, holding a crozier, the ceremonial staff associated with bishops and abbots. Turn to the other side and you find something harder to read: a heavily weathered face, pointed chin, framed by a roll-moulding that runs the full length of the shaft. The two carvings feel like they belong to different conversations, and together they give the cross an ambiguity that specialists have not entirely resolved.

The cross stands roughly 85 metres west of Tully Church in Laughanstown, cut from local granite and measuring 2.2 metres in height, with the expanded terminals characteristic of Irish high crosses, meaning the arms flare outward slightly at their ends rather than ending bluntly. It is tentatively dated to the 12th century. By the time W. F. Wakeman noted it in 1891 and an anonymous account appeared in 1900, the cross was already drawing attention, and a photograph taken by O'Reilly in 1901 shows it standing upright in the open field. At some point after that, its situation changed. It was set into one of two boulders that had stood beside it, and that boulder itself carries a small incised cross. Christiaan Corlett, writing in 2014, examined the cross in detail, and his account remains one of the more thorough treatments of the monument.

The cross sits in agricultural land west of Tully Church, which itself is a medieval site worth locating first as a reference point. The field setting means access depends on the usual courtesies of the Irish countryside, and the ground around the base can be uneven. The western face carving is genuinely worn, so low, raking light, on an overcast morning or late afternoon, tends to bring out what remains of the features better than bright midday sun. The boulder into which the shaft is now set is easy to overlook, but the small cross carved into it is worth examining once you have taken in the main monument.