In Gowran, County Kilkenny, that anchor has shifted more than once, and piecing together its movements turns out to reveal something about how the town itself changed shape over centuries. A map drawn by White in 1710/11 shows a cross standing towards the eastern end of the main street, in an area south of the road that locals, well into the twentieth century, were still calling the Bull Ring, a name that suggests livestock trading and the kind of rough commercial energy that once surrounded such spaces. By the time the map was made, the site appears to have already been partially built over, with a Malt House occupying ground that had likely once formed an open market place.

At the western end of Gowran there is a triangular fair green, the sort of open space that in many Irish towns began life just outside the formal boundary and was gradually absorbed as settlement crept outward. According to Avril Thomas, writing in 1992, this is precisely what happened here: the green was originally beyond the town but was drawn in as Gowran expanded westward. The market cross, it seems, followed the commercial centre as it migrated. Local tradition, recorded by Drennan in 1965, adds a more dramatic chapter: the Cromwellian forces who passed through the area broke the cross apart and left the pieces scattered across the green. Whether the fragments were ever gathered and re-erected, or whether what stands on the fair green today represents a later reassembly or replacement, is not entirely clear from the surviving evidence, but the tradition itself speaks to how central, and how vulnerable, these objects were in the memory of a community.