It is not a ruin in the conventional sense, because it is unclear whether it was ever quite finished or whole. The cross-head and its pillar may simply have never been joined, or they may have broken apart at some point in the unrecorded past. Either way, when the pieces are placed together they form a recognisable cross, roughly thirty centimetres tall and fifteen wide, plain and uncarved, wobbling slightly in the earth because the pillar is not set deeply enough to hold firm.

The burial ground in which the cross stands was noted in the Ordnance Survey Letters of 1838 under the name 'Carricknagross grave yard'. By 1943, when the historian and place-name scholar Liam Price visited and recorded it, it was being called 'Cornagrus graveyard'. Price found the enclosure itself, a roughly circular bank of large stones and earth about thirty-two yards across, to be a cashel-like structure; a cashel being a type of dry-stone walled enclosure associated in Ireland with early medieval settlement or ecclesiastical use. Inside, the boulders were largely moss-grown and gave little away. The stones near the cross had roughly the shape of a grave, though Price himself was cautious about reading too much into that. He recorded a local tradition, relayed by a man named Burke, that a priest was buried at the spot. The combination of the enclosing wall and the cross has led to the suggestion that this may have been an early ecclesiastical enclosure, though no carving or inscription survives to confirm any dedication or date.