In the burial ground of Killeen Cormac near Colbinstown, County Kildare, there is a cross that may or may not still exist. What was recorded is a base, a socket cut into stone to receive the shaft of a high cross, waiting for an upright that is simply gone. The socket itself tells the whole story of the absence: roughly seven inches by nine and a half inches across, five inches deep, and with one side broken away. Whatever stood in it has not been seen for a very long time.

The base was documented by Fitzgerald sometime between 1899 and 1902, measured and described with the care typical of late Victorian antiquarian fieldwork. At that point it was still standing, projecting about twenty-one inches above the ground. A cross base of this kind is exactly what the name suggests, the lower portion of a free-standing stone cross, usually left in situ even when the cross itself has fallen, been removed, or been lost entirely. Killeen Cormac is an early medieval burial ground with a long history of such fragments, a place where the visible record gives only a partial account of what was once there. Fitzgerald noted two possible cross bases in the vicinity, and this one, whichever of the two it corresponds to, was already missing its upper section when he recorded it. When subsequent fieldwork went looking, it could not be located at all.