Only the head survives, measuring 1.2 metres wide and 1.4 metres tall, and on one of its faces an incomplete figure of Christ can be made out in high relief, arms drooping and head tilted slightly to the right shoulder. The carving was abandoned mid-work, which gives it an oddly intimate quality that more polished examples lack. You are looking at the intention as much as the object.

High crosses, which typically combine a ringed head with a tall shaft and elaborate figural or interlace decoration, were a distinctive feature of early medieval Irish monasticism, and the Carrowntomush example shows both the ambition and the incompleteness of that tradition in a single piece. The short arms spring from a small solid ring, and both the arms and shaft carry volute ornament, a scrolling spiral motif with classical origins that appears widely in Irish ecclesiastical stonework. What was never carved, however, is as telling as what was. The original OS 6-inch maps placed the cross some 65 metres west-northwest of the church and graveyard, and it is now understood that it once stood on the summit of a small hillock. That hillock has since been quarried away, removing whatever context the cross once occupied in the landscape. At some point the surviving fragment was moved to its present position on the graveyard wall, where it has been secured rather than displayed in any formal sense.