It is a modest object by any measure, and yet it sits within an Early Christian settlement on a cliff-bound island of 241 acres, four miles off the western tip of the Dingle Peninsula, where the rocky terrain and thin soil have conspired to preserve the outlines of an older world almost undisturbed.

The island's southern half holds a small field system, and it is here, associated with a site dedicated to St. Brendan, that the cross was recorded. A second cross was once noted as lying in what may have been a leacht, a type of low cairn or prayer station traditionally used as a focus for devotion at early monastic sites, though that second stone has since gone missing. The surviving cross was described in detail by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey, which catalogued the extraordinary concentration of early medieval remains across the Corca Dhuibhne region. The northern half of Inis Tuaisceart, by contrast, shows no trace of any settlement activity at all, which makes the clustering of human presence in the south all the more striking. The island slopes upward from its south-eastern shore to a maximum height of 573 feet near its north-western ridge, and the prevailing sense is of a place that was always marginal, chosen precisely because it stood at the edge of the known world.