Listed: Grade II*, list entry 1106010, first listed 22 February 1967
Date: Probably fifteenth century
Height: About 2.5 m (listing)
The cross stands at the end of a small planted enclosure in the main street, beside the old chapel of St Mary. Historic England describes a complete late medieval cross, socket stone and plinth: a three-step plinth of granite ashlar with bull-nosed steps, a square socket stone with chamfered top edges, and a plain cross about 2.5 m high with chamfered arms and a slightly tapering shaft. It was once a single piece of granite and the head is now a separate piece. The listing calls it an integral part of the South Zeal townscape, and the village one of the few medieval boroughs in Devon where many late medieval houses survive.
William Crossing wrote in 1902 that the base stone is about 3 ft square and 20 in high, and the whole rises about nine feet above it on three steps. He also set right a story told by Ormerod in 1874, that a Roman Catholic stonemason repaired the cross after a vow made in a storm at sea. Crossing was told that about 1838 a South Zeal carpenter, John Stanbury, then living in America, repaired the cross on a visit home, with no storm involved. The villagers took off the initials and date he carved, and he never set foot in South Zeal again. South Zeal was licensed to hold a market and two fairs in 1299, which is why walkers' notes read it as a preaching cross and perhaps a market cross.
A second cross, Zeal Head Cross, once stood where the South Tawton road branches off, and a replica now marks that spot.
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