At the roadside on the north-western edge of Kilteel, a battered fragment of a twelfth-century sandstone cross sits in a landscape layered with several centuries of overlapping occupation. The cross head survives with only one arm intact, the other long since lost, and the whole assembly, head and base, has the look of something that has endured rather than been preserved. What makes it quietly unusual is not just its age but its accumulation of contexts: early monastery, medieval military order, and the boundary of the Pale all converge within a few metres of this spot.

The site began as 'Cell céli críst', an early Irish monastery whose name translates roughly as the church of the companions of Christ. On that monastic foundation, the Knights Hospitallers of St John of Jerusalem later established a preceptory, a house from which the order managed its local estates and obligations. The cross itself predates the Hospitallers and belongs to the twelfth century, carved from sandstone in a style that forgoes the ringed head typical of the classic Irish high cross form. Instead, it carries volutes, small scroll-like decorative details, in the armpits where the arms meet the shaft. One face bears a tall diamond-shaped panel in relief, possibly interlace, though the carving is worn enough that certainty is difficult; the other face is badly damaged and largely illegible. The base, which is more complete, is decorated with arcading, a series of small blind arches, running six to a face and four to each end. Running immediately to the south and west of the monastic and preceptory remains is a section of the Pale Boundary, the earthwork that once marked the limit of effective English colonial control in medieval Ireland, which gives the wider enclosure an almost diagrammatic quality as a place where layers of authority, religious, military, and administrative, left their physical marks in close succession.