It is an odd pairing. The cross itself is modest, just 17 centimetres high, rising from a triangular expansion at the base of its shaft. But the accompanying inscription is harder to explain. Terse, imperative, and unattributed, it sits there on the exposed stone without ceremony or obvious context, as though mid-argument with a person or a thing that is no longer present.

The outcrop measures roughly two metres by just over one metre, and it looks out over a broad sweep of landscape to the south-west, with Valencia Harbour visible in the distance. Locally, the site is described as a mass-rock, a term for the flat or near-flat stones at which Catholic priests celebrated Mass in secret during the Penal era, when the open practice of Catholicism was suppressed under English law. Such sites were typically chosen for their remoteness and their natural sight lines, qualities this outcrop possesses. Whether the cross and the inscription both belong to that period of use, or whether one predates the other, is not established. The archaeological record notes plainly that the nature of the site is unclear, and it has not been resolved since. The cross form, a plain linear Latin cross with that small triangular foot, does not point conclusively to any single period.

What remains is the strangeness of the phrase itself. 'DO NOT STIR' could be a boundary warning, a folk protective formula, a prohibition against disturbing the stone or the ground beneath it, or something else entirely. It is carved in proximity to a religious symbol on a rock associated with clandestine worship, overlooking a harbour on the Iveragh Peninsula, and nobody seems to know quite what it means.