For a long time it was treated as a simple pillar-stone, notable chiefly for the curious chequer pattern carved into one face and a plain sunken cross on the other, and for the local tradition that it marks the grave of a bishop who died at the hands of persecutors. It was not until 1963 that excavations nearby turned up a broken ringed cross-head, prompting a reassessment: what had appeared to be a freestanding pillar is almost certainly the shaft of a high cross, the distinctive form of carved stone monument associated with early Irish ecclesiastical sites.

Writing in 1905, the historian William Carrigan noted that while the church itself had entirely vanished, a circular earthen rampart roughly 27 metres in diameter still clearly enclosed the site. That enclosure survives. The shaft it contains, described in detail by Prendergast in 1964, is a rectangular granite column divided into two portions by a slight projection around its middle. The lower section is plain and dressed; the upper section carries the decorative work, including a recessed Latin cross on the east face and a chequer pattern of alternating sunken squares on the west. The recovered cross-head, though damaged, is a ringed type, meaning the arms are connected by a circular frame, with the arms hollowed at their intersection and splaying outward in a bell-like shape. A single central boss appears on each face; the more prominent one, on the obverse face, is 15 centimetres in diameter with a moulded edge, and may carry faint traces of ornament that are no longer legible. Prendergast, working from the proportions and style of both shaft and head, placed the cross in the 11th or 12th century, though he noted that the decorative programme on the upper shaft may never have been completed, or may simply have been lost to weathering over the intervening centuries.

The shaft remains embedded in the ground at the centre of the circular enclosure, which is itself still traceable as an earthwork. The cross-head, recovered separately during the 1963 investigations, is a broken fragment rather than a complete piece, and the full original height of the cross is impossible to determine given how much of the shaft is missing above the break.