It measures less than half a metre across and is crudely carved, broken at the shaft just below where the arms meet. Nothing about it announces itself. And yet that very plainness is what makes it interesting, because nobody is quite sure how old it is.

The cross sits to the west of Teampaill Bhreacáin, one of the early medieval ecclesiastical remains at Eoghanacht on Inis Mór. The question of its age has attracted at least two conflicting readings. John Waddell, writing in 1973, suggested it was probably relatively modern, the kind of rough devotional object that could have been made at any point in the recent past. Jope Higgins, however, argued in 1987 that the cross may be considerably earlier than that assessment allows. The absence of tooling marks characteristic of 18th or 19th century stonework is part of the case, but the stronger argument is contextual: the cross lies within a site of undoubted early Christian significance, and such settings were not casually chosen. A leaba, in Irish pilgrimage tradition, is a bed-shaped stone monument associated with a saint, sometimes used as a place of penitential lying or prayer, and Leaba an Spioraid Naoimh places this cross within that devotional landscape. Whether the object belongs to the early medieval period or to a later era of local piety copying older forms, its presence there is not accidental.

The cross remains where it was found, lying flat and unenclosed, the break in its shaft unrepaired. Visitors to Teampaill Bhreacáin who move a little to the west will find it without difficulty, though it is easily overlooked at ground level. Its roughness is not a sign of carelessness but may, depending on which scholar you follow, be the roughness of great age.