The cross-head, the shaft, and their respective origins are separated not only by geography but by the particular circumstances of the 1930s, when a parish priest took it upon himself to gather the pieces together. The result is a monument that looks coherent from a distance but carries a fragmented history close up.

The cross was one of two that originally stood at the ecclesiastical site of Kiltuc, in the townland of Shanganagh. In 1937, the Reverend J. P. Sherwin, the local parish priest, removed the cross-head from its original location at the Kiltuc church site and had it erected at St Anne's. The cross-base, a round boulder roughly 0.7 metres in diameter with a flat upper surface and a socket cut to receive a shaft, was left behind at the eastern wall of the church site. A housing estate now occupies that low-lying ground, and by the time surveys were conducted in 1979 the base was still present, though today no surface trace of it remains. The shaft proved to have a separate story entirely. Found around 1938 among rubble cleared from Shanganagh Castle during alterations to its basement, it bears a carved head in relief. Sherwin had it taken to his own garden in Ballybrack, where it stayed for some years before eventually being reunited with the cross-head at St Anne's. The other cross from Kiltuc was also moved, and now stands at Rathmichael.

The reassembled cross can be seen in the grounds of St Anne's Church in Shankill, on the southern edge of the Dublin suburbs. For those who want a closer look at the carved detail without travelling, a three-dimensional model is available online at skfb.ly/oI6XK. The original church site at Kiltuc is now absorbed into the Castle Farm housing estate and offers nothing visible above ground, but knowing the cross-base once lay there, and that the shaft turned up in builders' rubble several fields away, gives the object at St Anne's a different kind of weight.