Beyond that bare fact, the details remain elusive. The site belongs to a category of wayside or standing crosses found throughout the west of Ireland, objects that could mark anything from a parish boundary or a pattern day gathering point to a place of local devotion or a medieval preaching station. Without further documentation available, even that much is inference rather than certainty.

Toorard is a small rural townland in Mayo, a county with an exceptionally dense concentration of early Christian and medieval remains, many of them still only partially understood. Crosses of this kind range from roughly hewn slabs with incised Latin or ring crosses to more elaborately carved free-standing monuments, and they frequently occupy sites with layers of significance that accumulated over centuries. A cross might have been erected to Christianise an older sacred location, or simply to mark a place where people stopped to pray on their way somewhere else. The specific character of the Toorard cross, its material, its form, its dimensions, and any surviving decoration or inscription, remains undocumented in any publicly available source at present.