Somewhere along a Kildare roadside, a lump of granite sits so deep in the earth that it is almost invisible. Locally it was known as the Wart Stone, a name that suggests the kind of vernacular reverence that accumulates around old religious objects over centuries. The cross it once held is long gone, and even the stone itself has effectively vanished: its precise location is no longer known.

What survives in the historical record is a sequence of increasingly elegiac descriptions. Writing between 1899 and 1902, Fitzgerald noted a rough granite base sunk deep in the ground by the roadside, the cross above it already absent. Crawford, writing in 1907, used the drier term "socket stone", which is simply a dressed or rough block with a cut hole designed to receive the upright shaft of a standing cross. By the time P. O'Keeffe recorded the site for the Ordnance Survey Letters in 2002, even the socket stone was a matter of living memory rather than direct observation; he noted that he had met several people who remembered seeing the cross, which implies the shaft or its base had disappeared within a generation or two of his visit. The monument sits in a broader landscape of early Christian remains: a second cross base lies roughly 350 metres to the south-south-east, and a church with an associated graveyard stands about 200 metres to the east-south-east, suggesting this was once a significant local sacred site rather than an isolated roadside oddity.