There is no shaft, no carving, and one arm is missing entirely. What remains is the ringed head, the plain solid ring being the defining feature of the Irish high cross tradition, where a circle connects the arms and lends the form its structural and symbolic coherence, along with a damaged base block cemented onto a slightly larger shaped stone beneath it. The whole assembly stands at roughly the height of a child.

By 1928, when the antiquarian Crawford recorded it, the cross was already embedded in the northern fence of the road running towards Castlepollard, about a mile west of Fore, and was being steadily swallowed by the hedge. Crawford measured it at around four and a half feet tall including the socket stone, and noted the upper arm was gone. Fifty years later, a 1980 survey found the situation much the same but more degraded: the socket cut into the base had been repaired with cement, and the shaft had disappeared entirely. The question of whether the cross once sat on a stepped base, a more formal arrangement typical of grander examples, was left open, though the shaped stone underneath the base block suggests the possibility. What gives this battered fragment a longer history is a drawing made in the nineteenth century by George Du Noyer, an artist and geologist who travelled widely across Ireland recording antiquities for the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland. His sketch of the cross, labelled a calvary cross on the road near Fore in the townlands of Lackill and Moortown, preserves an image of it at a time when it was presumably more complete, or at least more legible.

Fore itself, a short distance to the east, is well known for its early monastic remains, and wayside crosses like this one were often markers of pilgrimage routes or parish boundaries, quiet indicators of a devotional landscape that has otherwise largely dissolved. This particular example is now so reduced, and so thoroughly absorbed into the fabric of a working farmyard entrance, that Crawford's warning from nearly a century ago still applies: being covered by the hedge, it is difficult to find.