What makes the one at Lugduff quietly odd is how much of it has disappeared into the earth. The cross stands only a metre above ground level, not because it was made small but because it has been gradually swallowed, its lower portion buried beneath centuries of accumulated soil and vegetation. What you see is already substantial, nearly three quarters of a metre wide and cut from mica-schist, a silvery, flecked metamorphic rock common to the Wicklow uplands, but the full depth of the thing remains a matter of guesswork.

The cross sits roughly two and a half metres to the north-east of the north-east corner of the chancel of a nearby church, placing it just outside the formal ecclesiastical boundary in a way that invites speculation about its original purpose and placement. It is a Latin cross, the form with one arm longer than the other three, and was documented by Patrick Healy in an unpublished Office of Public Works survey carried out in 1972. Healy's photograph of the cross reveals something further: a second cross is visible in the background, apparently propped against the east wall of the church nave. That second cross, referenced in an earlier study by Harold Leask published in 1950, has since been lost to record. Nobody who has surveyed the site subsequently has been able to locate it, which means that either it was moved, buried, or simply absorbed into the fabric of the wall itself. One cross partially in the ground, another vanished entirely; the Lugduff site has a way of keeping things from full view.