Local tradition holds that a cannonball, fired during an attack on nearby Ballymacaquim Castle, sheared it clean off. Whether or not that story is strictly true, the damage is real, and the cross now presents itself as a slightly lopsided object, its missing limb as conspicuous as anything that remains.

The cross is a substantial piece of carved limestone, 3.5 metres high, 0.65 metres wide, and 0.33 metres thick, and it represents an early stage in the evolution of the Irish high cross form, before the type settled into its more elaborate, sculptural maturity. The carving is described as crude, but not without intention. Across the west face, six circular motifs are incised into the stone, each running in the same clockwise direction. Two appear at the head, two on the left arm, one at the centre, and one just below it. These are thought to represent the figure of Christ in a condensed, symbolic shorthand, a way of encoding religious meaning through geometry rather than narrative scenes. When the antiquarian John O'Donovan visited and recorded the cross in 1841, he found it entirely coated in whitewash, which suggests that at some point in its history it was actively maintained and perhaps venerated, rather than simply left standing in a field.