It is not buried, not lost to farmland, and not locked behind a gate; it is simply there, on the grass edge of the road, ignored by passing traffic, its original context long gone.

The stone itself is a roughly squared limestone shaft, 1.76 metres tall, bearing an incised pedestalled cross and the date 1815. A pedestalled cross, in this context, is one carved with a stepped or base-like support beneath the cross proper, a form with roots in early Christian monument carving that persisted in Irish vernacular stonework well into the nineteenth century. The pillar originally stood in the old market-place of Menlough village, where it would have functioned as a kind of formal marker within the commercial and communal life of the settlement. It remained there for well over a century and a half. In 1972, pipe-laying work dislodged it, and the stone was broken in the process. Rather than being reinstated or taken into any kind of care, it ended up on the roadside verge, where it has remained. The circumstances of its displacement were recorded by E. Rynne, to whom the detail is attributed.

The break and the abandonment are, in their own way, as telling as the stone itself. An 1815 market cross, squared and incised by someone who knew the tradition they were working in, now lies horizontal and fractured a short distance from where it once stood upright. The date it carries outlasted the context that gave it meaning by about half a century before the pipe-layers arrived.