Somewhere in or around Castledermot, County Kildare, there stands, or once stood, a stone cross erected in 1620 in the name of John Fitzgerald. Nobody knows quite where it is now. It has its own official record number, assigned not because anyone can point to it on a map, but precisely because they cannot. The record exists to hold open a space for a monument that has slipped out of sight.

The cross is first mentioned in the work of the Reverend M. V. Comerford, whose writings on the Catholic history of Kildare and Leighlin were published in the early 1890s. Beyond the name Fitzgerald and the date 1620, the trail goes cold. The Fitzgeralds were one of the great Anglo-Norman dynasties of Leinster, a family whose branches spread widely across the region over centuries, so the name alone does not narrow things down easily. A dated memorial cross of that period would have been a fairly deliberate act of commemoration, erected at a time when public religious monuments carried real political weight in post-Reformation Ireland. Whether it marked a grave, a boundary, or a place of particular significance is not recorded. By the time researchers were cataloguing such things in the 1980s, the cross had already been missing long enough that its location was listed simply as unknown.