A modest stone block, roughly two feet by eighteen inches and hollowed with a basin, might not detain many passers-by on the roads around Ardmore in County Waterford. But this cross-base, known as Cloch Daha, carries an unusually layered biography, one that moves between early Christian boundary-marking, pre-Christian mythology, and the social customs of nineteenth-century rural Ireland.

The stone's name connects it to the Dagda, a figure from Irish mythology regarded as king of the Tuatha Dé Danann, the supernatural race said to have inhabited Ireland before the Gaelic peoples. Whatever its mythological associations, the stone's original function was probably more administrative than mystical. It is thought to have served as a termon cross, marking the northern boundary of the ecclesiastical enclosure around the early Christian churches of Ardmore. A termon, from the Latin terminus, was a zone of sanctuary surrounding a monastic site, and its boundary markers carried both legal and spiritual weight. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the stone had acquired an entirely different role: writing in the Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland in 1856 and 1857, E. FitzGerald recorded that it was the focus of a courtship ritual held on Ash Wednesdays, an unexpected fusion of the penitential and the romantic. The stone has since been moved approximately two hundred metres to the north-west of its original position, and along with the change of location came a change of story. Later accounts, including those of the Revd P. Power writing in 1932 and again in 1952, associate it instead with the dyeing of cloth, a tradition quite separate from both the ecclesiastical and mythological layers recorded earlier. T. J. Westropp also noted the site in his 1903 survey of Ardmore's antiquities. What the stone meant, it seems, depended very much on who was asked and when.