That detail alone makes it unusual. Most grave markers of the period were placed upright or laid flat as simple slabs; this fragment, measuring 0.4 metres by 0.18 metres and just 3.5 centimetres thick, was shaped into the form of a cross before being set down over the burial. It is a modest object by any measure, but its context is anything but.

The cross came to light during a series of archaeological excavations at Caherlehillan, a site in County Kerry containing an ecclesiastical enclosure, the kind of early monastic or church settlement enclosed by a boundary ditch or bank that was common across early medieval Ireland. The excavations were conducted over many years by John Sheehan, whose published reports spanning from 1994 through to 2009 document the gradual uncovering of the site and its graves. The cross fragment was recovered from the graveyard within this enclosure, associated with a grave that Sheehan concluded may belong to the very person who founded the site. Founder's graves in early medieval Irish ecclesiastical contexts were often given special treatment, placed at significant locations within a burial ground or marked in ways that distinguished them from ordinary interments. If the identification is correct, this small, rough-hewn cross was the marker chosen, perhaps centuries after the death it commemorated, to indicate a grave of particular importance to the community that maintained the site.