Three separate granite fragments, a base, a cross-head, and the lower portion of a shaft, have been assembled into a single standing monument, with the missing middle section of the shaft replaced in modern cement. That gap, plainly visible, is an honest admission of what time takes. What remains either side of it, however, is extraordinary: a densely carved programme of biblical imagery spread across the arms and faces of a cross-head that stands 1.54 metres tall and 1.25 metres wide.

The graveyard sits beside a twelfth-century church dedicated to St Fiachra, who tradition holds founded a monastery here in the latter part of the sixth century. The cross itself is earlier in character, belonging to the Irish high cross tradition in which carved stone slabs and free-standing crosses, a distinctively Irish form of monumental sculpture, were used to display scenes from scripture in a format that could instruct as well as commemorate. The east face carries the Crucifixion at the centre of the cross-head, Christ flanked by the soldier Longinus piercing his side with a lance and Stephaton offering vinegar on a pole, with angels above his shoulders. Surrounding panels work through Old and New Testament episodes: David playing the harp, Abraham and Isaac at the altar, Adam and Eve at the apple tree with its fruit-laden branches spreading over each figure. The west face is considerably more worn, but the arm panels are no less ambitious in subject matter. One shows what appears to be The Temptation of St Anthony, the saint bracketed by demons with human bodies and animal heads. Another depicts three figures, two upright and one inverted between them, a scene that has been read variously as the Slaughter of the Innocents, the Judgement of Solomon, or saints overcoming a devil, with no consensus settled. The cross base is decorated on its east face alone, divided into horizontal bands of interlace with a four-legged spiral and nail-head fills in the lowest register. That the sides and west face of the base carry nothing at all suggests the original setting was understood, the decorated face oriented to face the viewer approaching from a particular direction.

The cross stands immediately south-east of a handball alley that was built directly onto the east end of the church, a juxtaposition that is either endearing or alarming depending on your disposition. The alley is still there. Looking past it towards the graveyard, the reconstructed cross rises above the grass with its cement join and its worn, patient carvings, the scenes on the ring segments largely lost to weathering but enough surviving across the arms and base to reward a slow, close reading.