Look more closely, and the disc-headed form and worn figure carving tell a different story. This is a wayside cross, probably dating to around 1600, quietly enduring at the edge of a field boundary in Killaconin.

The cross is disc-headed, meaning the arms are enclosed within a circular frame, a form common in Irish ecclesiastical stonework of the late medieval and early modern periods. It is carved in limestone, with a shaft roughly half a metre tall and a span of about the same width, set into a rough rectangular base. The western face carries the more legible image: a Crucifixion scene worked in false relief, a technique in which the background is cut away to give the impression of depth without true three-dimensional carving. The figure shows a bearded Christ with arms stretched out horizontally and the head inclined slightly to the right. The eastern face has figure sculpture too, but it has suffered badly from weathering and can no longer be identified with confidence. Writing in the 1860s, the historian Cogan recorded it as an image of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which would make the pairing a conventional devotional arrangement, Christ on one face, his mother on the other. The cross bears comparison with a similar example at Kilmore, County Meath, which has been dated to around 1575, though the Killaconin carving is generally considered the rougher of the two in terms of execution. Crawford noted it in 1907, and it was already being recorded in Ordnance Survey mapping from as early as 1836, where it appears marked with the simple annotation "Stone Cross" in the characteristic italic lettering the surveyors used for antiquities.

The cross stands on the northern side of a road, mounted on a gate-pier, which makes it visible from the roadway without any need to enter private land. The worn eastern face is best examined in low, raking light, which can bring out traces of the damaged carving that are otherwise almost impossible to read.