The shaft and head are gone, leaving only a rectangular plinth whose upper portion tapers inward toward where the cross once rose. It is a fragment, plainly, yet what survives carries enough detail to make it worth pausing over: a relief armorial plaque on one face, and a Latin inscription running across three sides of a bevelled edge, cut in raised Roman capitals and now partially damaged.

The inscription, recorded by O'Leary in 1892, reads in part: "Domina Anna Butlera Filia Edmundi Butleri Viscomitis Mount-Garret in A.D. 16.." The date is lost to damage, but the story is legible enough. Lady Anna Butler erected the cross in memory of her father, Edmund Butler, the 2nd Viscount Mountgarrett, a title belonging to a senior branch of the Butler dynasty that held considerable power across Kilkenny and Tipperary through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The cross was placed in the grounds of Duiske Abbey, a Cistercian foundation whose church, after centuries of partial ruin, was eventually restored to use. The Cistercians, a monastic order that emphasised austerity and withdrawal from the world, established Duiske in the thirteenth century, and its graveyard continued to serve local and notable families long after the monks themselves were gone. That a Butler noblewoman chose this ground for her father's memorial speaks to the abbey's enduring prestige as a place of burial and commemoration.

The base sits outside the side chapel of the south transept, visible to anyone who walks the perimeter of the church. The inscription rewards close attention despite its mutilation, and the armorial plaque, though worn, remains identifiable in relief on the stone.