What makes it quietly arresting is not its size, which is modest at around fourteen centimetres across, but its form: a so-called marigold pattern, in which the arms of the cross are arranged within a circular, petal-like design. It sits in the open, exposed to the Atlantic weather, the kind of carving that could easily be walked past without a second glance.

The name Mass Mount gives the location a particular atmosphere. These were sites used for outdoor Catholic worship during the Penal Laws of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the celebration of Mass was prohibited and congregations gathered on hillsides and in hollows away from official scrutiny. Whether this cross is directly connected to that tradition is uncertain. Writing in 1968, a scholar named O'Brien suggested the carving may be of relatively recent date, which places a question mark over any straightforward medieval or early Christian reading of it. The site does not stand alone, however. A similar cross-inscribed stone lies roughly 150 metres to the north, and a holy well sits to the southwest, the well being a spring or water source traditionally associated with a local saint or with curative properties. Taken together, the cluster of features suggests this stretch of hillside carried some kind of devotional significance, even if the precise age and meaning of each element remains open to interpretation.