What makes the find quietly arresting is not just the age of the stonework but the layering of use written into it. The cross was broken, forgotten, and then quietly pressed back into service by people who carved their own marks onto it, centuries after whoever first raised it had gone.

The three pieces consist of a cross-shaft fragment, a cross-head, and a probable cross-base. The shaft, roughly 52 centimetres long and carved from granite with gently splaying sides, carries a slightly raised linear band on one face, a decorative detail that stops abruptly at a ledge near the bottom, the point at which the shaft would originally have slotted into a socket. That socket survives, or part of it does, in the battered rectangular block identified as the base: it is badly damaged and partly set into the ground, but the flat-bottomed, straight-sided socket it contains is consistent with how standing stone crosses were typically fixed in place. The cross-head, at 52 centimetres wide and 42 centimetres tall, fits the shaft fragment almost precisely at the break point. Between its arms sits a low carved boss, a shallow circular raised disc about 7 centimetres across, a feature found on early medieval Irish crosses. The opposite face of the head tells a different story entirely: crudely incised letters reading 'gD' appear in the upper arm, and the year 1712 is scratched across the transverse arms, split at the centre where the arms meet. This secondary inscription almost certainly marks the moment the old cross-head was dragged out and planted again, repurposed as a grave marker at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The shaft fragment, similarly, had been set loosely into the earth as a marker in its own right. The pieces were only recently identified as belonging together, their connection made visible by the close correspondence in their dimensions.