The Irish name, Crois Bhán, meaning White Cross, was considered significant enough to be marked in Gothic script on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1837, at which point it still stood upright beside the road. By around 1930, it had been broken, its arms removed to a nearby yard known as Carrigan's, the top piece left lying on the ground. A survey carried out in 1980 found the shaft itself, measuring just under a metre in length and around twenty centimetres wide, with chamfered corners and a bevelled base shaped to fit into a socket stone. A large limestone boulder nearby is thought to have served as that socket, though by then it was already lost in the undergrowth. The shaft's plain, squared top suggests it once supported a separate cross head, possibly still concealed in the same tangle of vegetation.

Folklore gathered between 1935 and 1938 by pupils at Faughalstown National School, as part of a nationwide collecting scheme, fills in some of what the stonework cannot say. The cross bore the letters I.H.S., a Christogram widely used on religious objects from the medieval period onward, and local tradition attributed its erection to Saint Feichín, an early medieval Irish monk associated with the monastery at Fore, roughly ten kilometres to the north. The nearby church and graveyard at Faughalstown, about 630 metres to the west, was said to have been the site of his chapel. The cross marked a point on the funeral route to that graveyard, and the schoolchildren's account is specific about what happened there: until around 1905, when hearses were not yet in common use in the area, coffins were carried by hand along the road, and when the procession reached the cross, mourners would stop and recite the De Profundis, Psalm 130, the traditional Catholic prayer for the dead. The cross was, in other words, a ritual pause built into the landscape, a place where grief had a fixed address. The shaft is dated by its construction style to the late medieval period, probably the sixteenth or seventeenth century, though the tradition connecting it to Saint Feichín reaches back much further in local memory.