In a graveyard at Coghlanstown, County Kildare, there sits a low granite block that is easy to walk past and difficult to fully explain. Moss and lichen have colonised its surface, softening the edges of what is otherwise a precisely worked stone: sub-rectangular in shape, with rounded corners, measuring roughly 85 centimetres long, 73 centimetres wide, and only 40 centimetres high. Cut into its upper face is a deep rectangular mortice, a socket intended to receive the upright shaft of a cross. The cross itself is gone, and the base sits quietly in place, holding the shape of an absence.

The block lies just to the north-east of a church within what may have been an early ecclesiastical enclosure, the kind of roughly circular or oval boundary that often surrounded early Irish monastic or religious settlements. About 850 metres to the east, a plain granite cross stands at the roadside, and it is possible that this wayside cross was originally the one that stood in this very socket before being moved or re-erected at its current location. The fit between base and cross has not been confirmed, but the proximity and the matching material make the connection a reasonable one to consider. If the theory holds, then what looks like a simple graveyard stone is actually the original foundation of a cross that has been separated from it, probably for centuries.