It is roughly sixty centimetres square, tapers slightly towards the top, and has a small rectangular socket cut into its upper face where a shaft once fitted. That socket is all that remains to indicate what this object once was: the base of a market cross, the kind of freestanding stone cross that historically marked a town's trading place and gave commercial transactions a degree of ceremonial legitimacy.

The cross's history involves at least one move and one act of deliberate destruction. A map of Gowran drawn in 1710 or 1711 by White shows a cross towards the eastern end of the main street, suggesting that the original market area lay to the south of that street, in a space later filled by a building recorded as a Malt House. The fair green at the western end of the town appears to have started life outside the settlement boundary, only becoming part of the town as Gowran expanded westward, a shift that scholars including Thomas, writing in 1992, have traced through the town's layout. As the green absorbed the commercial functions of the earlier market area, the cross seems to have migrated with them. Local tradition, recorded by Drennan in 1965, holds that Cromwellian forces broke the cross apart and scattered the pieces across the green. Whether any fragments beyond the base were ever recovered is not recorded, and the socket in the surviving stone now holds nothing at all.

The base sits on the south-western grassy island of the green, modest enough that it is easy to overlook. The rectangular socket in its top, measuring roughly eighteen by twenty centimetres and eighteen centimetres deep, is the most telling detail, a precise absence where a shaft once stood.