At Eochaill on the Aran Islands, northeast of the early church site known as Teampall Chiaráin, this is precisely what you find: a single upright slab bearing what is described as a double-armed Latin cross on its eastern face, the two crosses arranged one above the other in a format that raises more questions than it answers about the intentions of whoever commissioned it.

The pillar is made from the local limestone and measures 1.86 metres in height, with a maximum width of 0.46 metres and a thickness of 0.18 metres, dimensions that give it a tall, narrow presence. Bosses, small rounded projections worked from the stone itself, appear at the top of the pillar and on both sides. The two crosses differ from one another in a small but telling way: the arms of the upper cross appear to have had plain closed ends, while those of the lower cross are open-ended, a distinction that may reflect different symbolic intentions or simply a change of hand or period. At the junction of the arms and shaft on both crosses, a simple quatrefoil, a four-lobed decorative form, is carved into the stone. The monument has attracted scholarly attention since at least 1891, when W.F. Wakeman noted it, and it continued to be recorded by Crawford in the early twentieth century and by Higgins as late as 1987, suggesting it has long been recognised as something out of the ordinary even within the already-remarkable corpus of early Christian stonework found on the Aran Islands.