It is easy to overlook, being less than half a metre tall and split roughly from a larger whole, but what it represents is considerably older than most of what surrounds it: the surviving base of a high cross, likely carved sometime in the ninth century.

The fragment came to light in 1991, when the Office of Public Works removed an eighteenth-century wall that had been built between the north-east corner of Cormac's Chapel and the chancel of the Cathedral. High crosses, a distinctively Irish form of large free-standing stone crosses typically decorated with biblical scenes and intricate ornament, were a feature of important early medieval ecclesiastical sites, and Cashel was certainly among those. This particular base, measuring 0.73 metres wide and 0.38 metres in height, appears to have been split from its original form, leaving one face rough and hollow where the stone was cleaved. The surviving external face is the more telling: it carries a rectangular panel of interlinked spiral circles, framed by a rounded moulding, and there may be a figure carved at the right-hand side, though the detail is damaged. The two side faces preserve further traces of decoration, with an interlace pattern visible on one side and the other too worn to read clearly. The scholar Peter Harbison argued, on the basis of both style and historical context, that the base belongs to the ninth century, placing it among the earlier phases of stone cross production in Ireland.

The fragment is now kept inside the undercroft of the Vicars Choral, a late medieval building whose vaulted ground floor has become a repository for stone carvings and architectural elements recovered from across the Rock. It is worth pausing over this particular piece with some attention; its modest scale gives little away at first, but the spiral work on that surviving face, still crisp enough to follow with the eye, connects it to a period when Cashel was already a site of considerable ecclesiastical and political significance.