A small granite object, no taller than a shoebox stood on end, sits at the centre of what is known about early Christian stone carving in County Kildare, yet almost nothing is known about it at all. This is the capstone, or top-stone, of a Celtic cross, carved to resemble a miniature house: the two gable ends left plain and unadorned, but the roof surface worked into an alternating grid of squares meant to suggest slates or tiles, six in one row, seven in the next. It is an unusual survival. Most cross-caps of this type are understood in relation to the shaft they once crowned, but this one arrived in the historical record already detached, its origins unrecorded.

By the late nineteenth century the capstone was in the possession of a Dr J. M. Neale, who kept it at Newington House near Feighcullen in County Kildare. Fitzgerald noted it between 1891 and 1895, and Henry Crawford recorded it in 1907 with careful measurements: 15 inches in height, 14 inches in length at the base tapering to 12 inches at the top, and 9.5 inches in depth at the base. Underneath sits a socket, roughly 5.5 inches by 4 inches, which would once have fitted over the upper arm of a standing cross, holding the cap in place. The socket is the clearest evidence that this was a functional piece rather than a decorative curiosity. Crawford's account is candid about what remains unknown: where the cross-cap was originally taken from is not recorded, and no subsequent scholarship appears to have settled the question. The house-shaped capstone form, sometimes called a coped or roof-shaped cap, appears on a number of early medieval Irish crosses, though examples with such deliberately worked tile or slate patterns are comparatively rare.