At the south-western end of Johnstown Bridge village, a small cross sits atop a tall limestone column at a T-junction, looking for all the world like a piece of unremarkable roadside piety. Look closer, though, and the object turns out to be a quiet puzzle assembled from at least three different moments in time: a medieval inscription, a nineteenth-century cherub, and a column that was purpose-built to display something recovered from the earth.

The pyramidal limestone base, which measures roughly half a metre in height and just over half a metre in width, carries a cross set into a mortice on its upper surface. Carved into that cross are the letters "IHS" and the date 1412, placing the original object firmly in the late medieval period. At some point a cherub was carved in relief on one face of the base, a stylistic detail that belongs clearly to the nineteenth century and sits in odd company with the older inscription. The base and cross were then raised onto a tall column of well-dressed limestone blocks, itself around 2.2 metres high. Two nineteenth-century accounts disagree about how it all came together. Writing in the 1890s, Fitzgerald recorded that the cross was dug up in the neighbourhood around 1830 and set up as a commemorative cross marking the suppression of Catholic religious life, a practice that produced a number of such monuments across Ireland in the years following Catholic Emancipation. O'Leary, writing at roughly the same time, offered a different origin story, suggesting the cross had come from a church dedicated to St Fionntan at Clonagh, about a mile and a half to the west-south-west. That church site, if O'Leary is right, would have been its home for several centuries before it was moved.

The cross is straightforwardly visible at the junction, set on its column in plain sight, though the layering of periods and competing histories is not something the object advertises about itself.