The cross itself was broken or removed long ago, leaving three graduated square steps rising to an empty socket, a wayside monument reduced to its foundations. What looks at first like an unremarkable piece of street furniture turns out to be the remnant of an early seventeenth-century memorial, moved from its original location around 1800 and stripped of almost everything that once identified it.

The cross was erected by Ellen Butler, daughter of Edmond, second Viscount Mountgarret, in memory of her husband Lucas Shee, who died in 1622. A wayside cross of this type was intended to prompt passers-by to stop and pray for the souls of the dead, and a partial inscription still legible around 1835 did exactly that, invoking travellers to pray for the repose of Lucas Shee and his wife. The armorial carvings were equally specific: the O'Shee arms set alongside those of the Mountgarret family, accompanied by sculptures of the emblems of the Passion, the objects associated with the crucifixion that appeared widely in Irish and European religious art of the period. By the mid-nineteenth century, when the antiquarian Prim recorded the monument, vandalism had defaced both the inscription and the heraldry. Before that, around 1800, Sir William Morres of Uppercourt had moved the whole structure some 600 metres from its original position near the back entrance to his demesne to the village green, a relocation that was probably tidying rather than preservation. Writing in 1905, Carrigan noted that the cross itself was already long gone, leaving only the graduated base and socket, which is precisely what survives today. The pedestal's three tiers measure nearly three metres across at the base, suggesting the cross that once stood above them was a substantial presence on the road into Freshford.