A small square block of limestone, roughly three-quarters of a metre on each side, sits in Sherlockstown graveyard in County Kildare. Its upper surface is chamfered, and at the centre there is a small rectangular mortice, a socket cut to receive the shaft of a cross that has long since disappeared. What remains is essentially a pedestal without its monument, a base that has outlasted whatever it once supported by several centuries at least.

The cross was one of a pair of wayside crosses marked on Noble and Keenan's 1752 map of County Kildare, standing roughly 900 metres to the north, along the road between Sherlockstown and Straffan. Wayside crosses were common features of the Irish rural landscape, typically erected at roadsides, boundaries, or points of devotional significance, though the shafts and arms, being the most exposed and structurally vulnerable parts, rarely survived intact. By the time a local account was published in the 1890s, only the bases of both crosses remained. One of the bases had by then been incorporated into the boundary wall of a property called Little Rath, a fate that the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1838 had already documented, suggesting the shaft had been lost well before that survey was made. At some point after the late nineteenth century, both bases were moved from their respective locations to Sherlockstown graveyard, where they remain. The surviving base retains enough of its original form to make its purpose legible: that mortice in the top surface would have gripped the tenon of a stone shaft, holding the cross upright against whatever the road threw at it across the centuries.