It originated at an early monastic site in Ballyogan, where the church it once accompanied has entirely disappeared from ground level. The cross itself survives, incomplete but densely carved, its shaft and base both broken, yet still carrying an unusually full programme of biblical imagery across all four faces. That combination of displacement, survival, and narrative richness makes it worth examining closely rather than simply walking past.

The cross is carved from granite, and its panels are each framed by individual mouldings, with roll-mouldings running along the edges. On the east face, the imagery moves from Old Testament scenes on the shaft upward to a Crucifixion on the head: David sits playing a harp with a curving frame, Abraham raises a knife over Isaac who leans awkwardly backwards from him, and a third scene shows a figure beside an apple tree in what scholar Peter Harbison, writing in 1992, reads as possibly the Lord reproving Adam rather than the more familiar image of Eve offering the apple. At the top, Christ stands frontally in a long-sleeved robe, flanked by Stephaton and Longinus, with two small figures above his head that Harbison considered more likely to be angels than the apostles Peter and Paul. The west face carries a different sequence: at the shaft's base, two figures embrace while a third looks on, identified as the Visitation of Mary and Elisabeth; above them, interlinking S-spirals with small bosses fill the shaft; and at the top, what Harbison reads as the Annunciation, with one figure walking towards a seated figure who raises a hand in response. The base panels on the west face each bear a ringed cross in raised relief. The ring of the cross itself is described as having a battlemented line running between its roll-mouldings, an unusual decorative detail. Killanin and Duignan, writing in 1967, also attributed a scene of the Massacre of the Innocents to the west face, suggesting the carved programme was even more extensive than what is now legible.

The cross stands in the graveyard adjacent to Duiske Abbey, the restored Cistercian church in Graiguenamanagh, and it is not alone there. Another high cross, known as the Aughkiletaun cross, stands nearby, meaning the graveyard contains two displaced early medieval monuments within a short distance of one another. The Ballyogan church from which this cross came has left no visible trace above ground, so the cross is the primary evidence for whatever monastic community once occupied that site.