The mismatch is not accidental. The cross sitting there today, a ring-headed wayside cross probably dating to the 17th century and standing just 0.68 metres above its base, was not made for the stone it occupies. It was lifted from the nearby graveyard at St. Mary's Church at some point in the early 1900s and set into a socket stone that almost certainly once held something considerably more substantial. Concrete now fills the gap between shaft and socket, a quiet admission that the two pieces were never meant for each other.

The socket stone is thought to be the surviving base of a market cross, the kind of carved stone monument that once marked the commercial and civic centre of a borough town. Fore held a weekly market and fairs, and by 1875 a surveyor recording place names noted an ancient stone cross in the market place, already described as dilapidated, with only a portion remaining. The shaft and upper section of that original cross had disappeared by the time anyone thought to document it carefully. When Crawford examined the assembled object in 1928, he recorded the wayside cross in some detail: a solid recessed ring head, a crucifixion carved on the front face with the figure's arms horizontal and feet crossed, and a large socket stone with inclined sides. He also noted that the cross had, until recently, been lying in the graveyard before being fixed into its present position in the village street. The 1910 Ordnance Survey map had already marked it simply as 'Cross', as though its precise identity were settled, though the question of what exactly the base once supported remains open.

The cross sits in the triangular green that has defined the village's small centre for centuries, and the discrepancy in scale between socket and shaft is visible on close inspection. The base itself measures roughly 0.71 metres wide and 0.4 metres high, cut from what appears to be conglomerate stone, and the socket opening is noticeably wider and deeper than the shaft it now holds. It is a composite object, assembled from the remnants of at least two separate histories, and it reads that way once you know what to look for.