What makes it quietly remarkable is not the cross itself, which is a simple Latin cross, the standard upright-and-crossbar form, set on a tall drum-shaped base and now mounted on a concrete plinth, but rather the evidence of its longevity in a very particular place. It carries no decoration, no carved figures, no inscription. It simply endures.

The cross appears in the 'Pacata Hibernia', a collection of maps and illustrations documenting the Elizabethan wars in Ireland, published in the early seventeenth century and later studied by the antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp, who referenced the drawing in papers published in 1903 and 1904. What Westropp noted was that the cross appears in roughly the same position in that historic drawing as it occupies today, which means it has remained more or less in place for well over four centuries. The survey record compiled by Denis Power for the Urban Archaeological Survey of County Limerick, produced by the Office of Public Works in 1985, provides the dimensions: 83 centimetres high, 68 centimetres wide. For a monument of its age, it is a modest physical presence, which may be part of why it tends to go unnoticed.

The friary grounds in Moig South are the context for visiting the cross, and the monument sits within that ecclesiastical setting rather than in open countryside. Because the cross is plain and lacks the visual drama of carved stonework, it rewards a certain kind of attention, the kind that comes from knowing what you are looking at before you arrive. The drum-shaped base is worth examining closely, as it is an unusual form of mounting. The concrete plinth beneath it is a later addition, a practical intervention that says something in itself about how such things have been maintained over the intervening centuries.