It is the kind of practical, quietly ingenious detail that rarely survives in the record, and in this case even the cross itself has not survived, at least not in any location anyone has been able to confirm.

The market at Callan was no informal gathering. It was authorised by royal charter in 1568, granted by Queen Elizabeth I, which permitted trading on Wednesdays and Saturdays each week. A market cross, typically a stone monument erected at the centre of a trading place to confer a degree of sanctity and civic order on commercial transactions, would have been a natural fixture at such a site. The cross appears on an estate map drawn by Thomas Stuish in 1681, which places it clearly at this four-way junction. It was still standing towards the end of the eighteenth century; a traveller who passed through in 1779 and recorded the visit in a published tour described the lantern in enough detail to suggest it was functioning and maintained at that point. Whether the cross was a medieval survival adapted with the lantern at some later stage, or whether the lantern was original to its construction, the notes do not say. What is known is that it disappeared at some point after that 1779 account, and neither the date of its removal nor its present whereabouts have been established.