But anyone who goes looking for the cross itself will find only its ghost, a low rectangular platform of earth and grass-covered stones, roughly two metres by one and a half, rising barely half a metre from the ground on a slight natural ridge beside the road to Oldcastle.

By 1928, a local survey recorded that nothing remained of the cross proper, just the small platform of stones and clay that had once served as its base. A more detailed account from 1980 confirmed the same picture, measuring the surviving structure and noting that even the field fences visible on a 1914 Ordnance Survey map had since been removed, leaving the base sitting just inside the roadside fence with little to mark it out from its surroundings. The site lies about a mile and a half north-east of Fore, the County Westmeath village whose ruined Benedictine priory and associated early Christian remains draw most of the attention in this part of the midlands, and it sits only 150 metres west of the Meath county boundary, one of those quietly odd positions that gives a monument the feeling of belonging to no particular place.

What survives is less a monument than a trace, the kind of feature that the landscape has nearly absorbed. The platform is visible from the roadside on the southern verge, though without prior knowledge it would be easy to pass it as a natural undulation in the ground. The absence of the cross itself is, in a way, the whole point; what remains is a record of where something once stood, and of how thoroughly the countryside can swallow even a named and mapped piece of its own history.