Sitting on the northern verge of a road in Crossmorris, Co. Kildare, is a lozenge-shaped limestone block that most passing drivers would take for an unremarkable lump of old stone. It is, in fact, the surviving foot stone of a memorial cross, and it has acquired a second life under the name the "Wart Stone", a piece of folk nomenclature that has entirely eclipsed the more solemn reason the object was placed here in the first place. The block measures roughly 1.2 metres in length and just under half a metre in height, and cut into its upper face is a shallow rectangular mortice, the socket into which the shaft of the cross was once fitted.

The cross was raised to mark the spot where Sir Maurice FitzGerald of Lackagh was killed in 1520, during what the antiquarian Fitzgerald, writing in 1918 and 1919, described as an affray with Con mac Melaghlin O'More of Leix, Chief of his name. O'More was head of one of the most powerful Gaelic families in the midlands, and the encounter, whatever its precise cause, ended fatally for FitzGerald. A roadside memorial cross of this kind served both as a marker of the event and as a prompt for prayers for the dead, a common practice in late medieval Ireland. The cross did not survive intact. Only the foot stone on the verge and a richly sculpted portion of the shaft, now held at Kilkea Castle some distance to the south-west, are known to remain. The two fragments have been separated for long enough that the carved shaft piece and the plain socketed base are rarely considered together, though they once formed a single object erected at what was, for a moment in 1520, a significant and violent spot on the Kildare landscape.