It is one of four portable crosses recovered from Illaunloughan, a sliver of land sitting roughly 120 metres off the Kerry mainland, and the excavators who worked there between 1992 and 1995 classified all four as pilgrim crosses, objects likely carried by or left behind by those making some form of devotional journey. This particular cross, catalogued as Cross 4, has a rectangular shaft and one surviving arm with rounded angles; part of its head and the opposing arm are missing. It is a fragment, but a telling one, and it came out of unstratified ground during conservation work, meaning its precise archaeological context within the island's sequence of use could not be recovered.

Illaunloughan itself is an unusual place to have attracted such objects. There is no surviving historical documentation for the site, and even the island's name resists easy explanation. One reading connects it to a saint called Lochán, a figure mentioned twice in the Martyrology of Oengus, a calendar of Irish saints compiled around AD 800. That theory gains some weight from the existence of an ecclesiastical site called Killoughane, meaning the church of Lochán, at the eastern end of the Iveragh peninsula, suggesting a broader devotional geography centred on the same figure. A competing interpretation is more prosaic: the name may simply mean the island of the chaff. The four seasons of excavation completed between 1992 and 1995 covered approximately seventy per cent of the island, making this one of the more thoroughly investigated early Christian island sites in Kerry, even if the written record remains silent about who used it, when, or why.