The cross, known in Irish as "Crois-gar", meaning the little cross, stands only around two feet in height, with arms spanning roughly nineteen and a half inches. Its modest scale apparently bothered someone enough to intervene: by the mid-nineteenth century, the base on which it rests was already recognised as a later addition, constructed by local people in an effort to lend the diminutive object a more commanding presence.

The cross was noted in print in 1854 to 1855, described as "evidently very old", though subsequent observers were less certain about its age. The Reverend James Graves, a prominent figure in the study of Kilkenny antiquities, proposed that it might originally have served as a gable cross, the decorative stone cross fixed at the apex of a church gable end, belonging to the nearby medieval church at Ballycallan, which lies roughly a kilometre to the north-east. That connection, if real, would place the object within a broader landscape of medieval religious activity in the area. By 1907, however, the antiquary H. S. Crawford looked at the same cross and recorded it as a plain, unadorned piece, around eighteen inches high, and ventured that it appeared to be modern. The disagreement between these assessments, old versus modern, ancient relic versus recent stonework, has never been formally resolved, and the cross occupies an awkward position in the record: too plain to read easily, too small to impress without assistance, and too ambiguous to classify with confidence.