It is a modest object by any measure, standing just 34 centimetres tall with a shaft 15 centimetres wide, yet its proportions carry a quiet specificity: the upper transom, which projects 4 centimetres above the cross arms, gives it a slightly unusual silhouette, distinct from the more familiar ringed high crosses found elsewhere in Ireland.

The cross stands within a large ecclesiastical enclosure, the kind of roughly circular or oval boundary, often formed by an earthen bank or ditch, that typically marks an early Irish monastic or church site. Within the eastern quadrant of this enclosure lie the remains of a church and an associated graveyard, suggesting a site with a long devotional history, even if the documentary record for Preban itself is thin. The cross's placement near the centre of the church foundations hints that it may have served as a focus of worship or commemoration within the building itself, though whether it is a fragment of something larger or always stood at this scale is not recorded.