The socket in its top, roughly 19 centimetres wide and 16 centimetres deep, was cut to hold a cross shaft that has been missing since at least the 1930s. The base itself is just over a metre tall on its intact southeast face, chamfered around its upper edges and broadening slightly about halfway down. A large flat flagstone lies beside it on the northeast side, a smaller one on the southwest. What gives the whole object its particular quality is the name the place has carried for centuries, recorded on the first Ordnance Survey map of 1840 as "Crushshuvaunhenry", an anglicisation of the Irish "Crois Shiobhán Henry", meaning Siobhán Henry's cross. Someone, at some point, thought this cross important enough to name after a specific person, and that name has outlasted the cross itself.

Wayside crosses were a common feature of the medieval Irish landscape, erected along roads and paths as markers of devotion, territorial boundaries, or routes to sacred sites, and this one stood close to an ecclesiastical enclosure lying roughly 150 metres to the northwest. Writing in 1907, H. S. Crawford identified the base as a medieval cut-stone pedestal, clearly part of a roadside monument, and the characterisation was echoed by Reynolds in 1975. The cross shaft it once held is gone; local tradition holds that it was removed in the 1930s by a Protestant woman from the nearby town of Fethard, though where it went after that is unknown. The base remains where it has long stood, a little elevated above the road, missing a large portion of its northwest side but otherwise keeping its shape, waiting, in effect, for something that is not coming back.