At Castledermot in County Kildare, what survives of the West Cross is not the cross itself but the base that once held it: two tiers of granite, carefully cut, with a mortice socket at the top where the shaft would once have been fitted. The base sits on a plinth close to the Romanesque doorway of the old monastic site, and the proximity of the two elements, one a remnant of early Christian sculpture, the other a finely carved twelfth-century arch, gives a quiet sense of how densely layered the site once was.

The base is relatively modest in scale, standing 88 centimetres high, with the lower tier measuring 75 by 53 centimetres and the upper narrowing to 37 by 30 centimetres. The mortice, the square socket cut to receive the tenon at the foot of the cross shaft, measures roughly 19 by 17 centimetres and drops about 27 centimetres deep. Granite is a hard, coarse stone not always easy to work with precision, which makes the careful cutting of that socket a small detail worth pausing over. The cross it once supported is gone, but the base records its presence with the kind of specificity that rough stone can hold for centuries.