It measures just fourteen centimetres across and was made using a compass, the kind of precise, pivoting tool that produces a perfectly circular arc. Alongside it, whoever held that compass also attempted a marigold pattern, a decorative rosette form that appears on carved stones and grave markers across Ireland and Britain. The execution is modest, almost tentative, and O'Brien, writing in 1968, noted that the cross may be of relatively recent date rather than medieval origin. That ambiguity is part of what makes it interesting: it sits in a landscape layered with older devotional significance, yet may itself be the work of a hand not so very distant from our own.

The hill's name gives some context. Mass Mount is a term associated with outdoor Catholic worship during the Penal era of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when public celebration of the Mass was prohibited under law and congregations gathered on hillsides, often at exposed but significant vantage points. Whether this particular cross was made during that period or later, it belongs to a cluster of related features. A similar compass-scribed cross lies roughly 150 metres to the south, and a holy well, the kind of site long associated with local pilgrimage and informal devotion, sits to the southwest. Together they suggest a small, informal sacred landscape rather than a single isolated curiosity.

The outcrop looks out over Bantry Bay and Adrigole Harbour. The two crosses and the holy well are close enough together that a careful walk across the slope would take in all three, though the ground is open hillside and the markings themselves are small and easily passed over without knowing where to look.