It is not large, not decorated, and carries no inscription. At just under seventy centimetres tall, with arms so abbreviated they barely register as projections, measuring only two to three centimetres in length, it is the kind of object that could be passed without a second glance. What earns it attention is a carved finial at its crown, a neat double-gabled detail that suggests someone, at some point, put considered effort into a monument that is otherwise quite rough in its execution. The shaft widens as it approaches the ground, and is noticeably thicker at the top than at the base, an inversion of what you might expect from a well-dressed piece of stonework.

Dysert O'Dea is a site with considerable depth behind it. The church and its round tower, the elaborately carved Romanesque doorway, and a high cross of far greater ambition all occupy the same graveyard. This smaller cross has occupied its spot close enough to the church to be clearly associated with the complex, and was recorded simply as 'Cross' on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1920, which speaks to a kind of local matter-of-factness about its presence. The circular-headed form is a recognisable type in early Irish ecclesiastical contexts, though here the execution is, as the scholarly description puts it, rudely carved, meaning roughly worked rather than precisely dressed. The double-gabled finial is the one flourish that distinguishes it, and it sits at the top of a cross that otherwise keeps its ambitions modest.

Visitors to Dysert O'Dea tend to arrive for the high cross and the Romanesque church, both of which are genuinely arresting. The smaller cross stands to the south of the church, easy to overlook in that company, and is best viewed from the north, where the carved finial feature reads most clearly against the sky.