That slight irregularity, easy to miss, is one of several details that make this early medieval monument quietly worth attention. The cross was described in 1909 by the antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp simply as "curious", which, for a man who catalogued monuments across Clare with methodical thoroughness, amounts to a meaningful observation.

The cross is a ringed type, standing 1.18 metres above ground with arms spanning 0.67 metres and a thickness of only 0.1 metres, making it a relatively slender piece of stonework. Roll mouldings, shallow rounded ridges, run along the edges. On the west face, traces of a circular motif survive at the centre of the head, possibly the remains of interlace decoration, the knotted geometric patterns common to Insular religious art; a second set of circles sits below it on the same face. The east face is plain. The shaft fits into a hole cut in a raised limestone slab, which forms the top of a leacht, a low commemorative or devotional cairn of a type associated with early Irish religious sites. This combination of a free-standing cross mounted on a leacht is characteristic of early Christian practice in the west of Ireland. On the basis of its form and surviving decoration, the cross has been dated to the twelfth or early thirteenth century, placing it in the later phase of the Romanesque period in Ireland.

The cross sits to the south of a medieval church and to the west of a later chapel, so visitors to the graveyard at Noughaval encounter several overlapping layers of religious use across a compact and largely undisturbed site. The west face, with its faint circular ornament, is the more rewarding side to examine closely.