The head is gone, and what remains at the top is a tenon, the protruding tongue of stone that would once have slotted into a separately carved crosshead. That detail alone makes it worth pausing over. Most visitors to the Royal Hospital Kilmainham arrive for the building or the Irish Museum of Modern Art housed within it, and relatively few wander as far as the graveyard known as Bully's Acre, a name whose bluntness suits its character. This burial ground has served soldiers, paupers, and plague victims across the centuries, and sitting quietly in its corner is this carved shaft, 0.71 metres wide and 0.31 metres thick, set into a granite base.

The carving on the shaft is careful and considered, even in its current truncated state. The east face carries a sunken panel containing a vertical rib in relief that opens into a spiral at the base and expands upward into a V-shape. Turn to the west face and you find a different scheme: an interlace pattern, also set within a sunken panel, terminating in two pendant forms with circular bosses at the top. The sides of the shaft carry sunken panels as well, giving the whole piece a coherence that suggests a single sustained carving programme. The shaft is catalogued and described by Peter Harbison in his 1992 corpus of Irish high crosses, which remains the standard reference for such monuments.

Bully's Acre sits within the grounds of the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, just west of Dublin city centre, and is accessible on foot from the main site. The graveyard itself is not always prominently signposted, so it is worth knowing to head for the south-east corner once you are inside. The shaft stands on its granite base without barrier or enclosure, which means you can walk around it and examine all four faces at close range. The interlace on the west side and the spiral rib on the east are easier to read in low-angled light, so an overcast day or a morning visit often reveals the relief carving more clearly than bright midday sun. There is no interpretation panel on site, so coming with some prior knowledge, or a note of the Harbison reference, will help make sense of what you are looking at.