The shaft is made of two portions that do not fit together properly, and scholars have noted such differences in relief height, moulding, and ornament between its two main figurative panels that it may originally have been two separate crosses, later combined. Christ's head, displayed on the east face with arms outstretched, was fixed in place in 1883 and may never have belonged to the cross at all. The stones forming the decorated base may have started life as part of an altar from the nearby Romanesque church. What stands in this field, then, is partly a medieval sculpture, partly a puzzle, and partly a careful act of later reconstruction.

The cross is traditionally associated with Saint Tola, held to be the founder of the monastic site at Dysert O'Dea, and is sometimes called the White Cross of Tola. It is classed as Romanesque, placing its origins in the twelfth century, though the carved surfaces speak across several periods and hands. The east face carries a figure of a bishop or abbot in high relief, complete with pointed mitre and crozier, the right hand missing where it may once have been inserted into a socket at waist height. The west face bears a Saint Brigid's cross formed from five lozenges, along with Adam and Eve at the base. The south face shows Daniel in the Lion's Den, and the north face has an unidentified scene of two figures grasping a staff. Animal interlace panels run across multiple faces, and mortice-holes at the ends of the arms suggest that something, now lost, was once attached there. The cross was repaired in 1683 by Michael O'Dea, son of Connor Crone O'Dea, as recorded in an inscription cut into the east face, the bottom of which was trimmed away specifically to accommodate the text. A second inscription on the south base records that Francis Hutchinson Synge of Dysart, fourth son of the late Sir Edward Synge, re-erected the cross in 1871. The decorative base stones on which everything rests sit in turn on a projecting modern plinth. Three separate hands, across three very different centuries, have all left their mark on what stands here today.

The cross sits on a low mound roughly 120 metres east of the Dysert O'Dea church, and Saint Tola's holy well lies approximately 240 metres to the south-east. The site is a national monument in State care. Approaching from the church, it is worth circling the cross slowly, since each of the four faces tells a different story, and the joins and mismatches that scholars have puzzled over are visible enough to the patient observer.