The earliest evidence for the existence of the stones now at St Mary's is to be found in engravings and drawings of the Sandbach Market Square monument prepared by Alexander and the Lysons at some date before 1810 (Byrne 1810, pl. 15; BL Add. MS 9461, f. 122v); these representations are to be preferred to the elevation and plan subsequently published by the Lysons which were designed as reconstructions (Lysons 1810, fig. facing 460). The Lysons's manuscript drawings and Alexander's engraving show stones with figural ornament and spherical tops in the north-east and north-west corners of the platform — probably to be identified with St Mary's nos. 1 and 2 — and a further stone in the south-east corner. Alexander adds a fourth stone placed half-way along the east side. All of these stones rest at ground level. Significantly these illustrations pre-date the 1816 re-assembly of the scattered fragments of the two Market Square crosses.

Palmer's engraving for Ormerod, produced in 1816, depicts the same arrangement as in Alexander's representation and is essentially that recorded in Earwalker's drawing of 1890, though there is some variation in whether the stones stand on the ground or on one of the steps (Ormerod 1819, III, pl. III; Earwalker 1890, fig. facing 14). Rimmer's engraving, published in 1875, adds figural ornament to the stone mid-way along the east side (Rimmer 1875, 84). It follows that, though there may have been some movement of carvings in the 1816 restoration, all of the St Mary's stones probably formed part of the Market Square monument before that early nineteenth-century re-assembly and may already have been there when the two large crosses were described by William Smith in 1585 (Hawkes 2002, 26–7). The stones were removed to the churchyard in the 1950s (Rosser 1958, 142).

A (west): Below the rounded top is an arched panel, with lateral framing mouldings, containing a deeply-cut, tall and slender forward-facing figure, possibly holding a rod over his right shoulder; he wears a knee-length robe which droops at each corner. There are traces of a small rectangular panel below but any ornament it carried has now been lost.

B (south): Traces of an arch are all that remain of any decoration on this face.

C (east): Traces of the arched top of a panel can be seen at the top of the stone. The (once) deeply-undercut ornament below this cannot be certainly identified but is best resolved as a human figure.

D (north): This face was decorated with two arched panels set one above the other. The contents of the lower panel have been lost but the upper panel contains a squat figure, turning to the right, wearing a sharply drooping skirt and holding a large curved object (?horn) across his body.

The use of arched panels set one above the other repeats a decorative organisation used on the main Market Square shafts; the same scheme recurs on a Sandbach-related shaft at Chesterton in Staffordshire (Hawkes 2002, pl. 5.6). The two Market Square crosses provide parallels, though in less stylised form, for all of the figures and their accoutrements: drooping hemlines; elongated figures; men with rods over their shoulders; profile figures holding a curved object (see Chapter IV, p. 23). In addition the same measurement units as were employed on the Market Square shafts are used both here and on the other churchyard carvings (Hawkes 2002, 123–4).
Radford (1957, 5) argued that this stone, together with St Mary nos. 2, 3 and the head fragment now Market Square 3, all formed part of the same cross. The measurements of the St Mary stones suggest, rather, that they formed separate monuments (Hawkes 2002, 126–7).

[1] Numbers in bracketed italics are those given by Radford (1957) and Hawkes (2002), and used in the present display.

[2] The following is a general reference to the Sandbach St Mary stones: Higham, N. 1993b, 167–9.