That is what the word portable implies, and it shifts the imagination considerably. Found on Illaunloughan, a low-lying island in the Portmagee Channel barely 120 metres from the Kerry mainland, this is one of four such objects recovered during excavation and described by the archaeologists who dug there as pilgrim crosses. The cross itself is fragmentary now: the shaft survives, one arm with rounded angles is largely intact, the other arm is gone, and the head has been partially damaged. Even incomplete, it reads as a purposeful, personal object rather than a fixed monument.

Illaunloughan sits about 400 metres west-northwest of Portmagee village, in the barony of Iveragh. Four seasons of archaeological work between 1992 and 1995 excavated roughly 70 per cent of the island, revealing it as an early Christian site of some significance. The island's name remains unresolved. Researchers Marshall and Walsh noted in 1998 that there is no historical documentation for it, and two competing explanations exist. One possibility is that Lochán was a saint connected to the island, a reading supported by the appearance of two figures named Lochan in the Martyrology of Oengus, an early Irish calendar of saints compiled around AD 800, and by the existence of an inland ecclesiastical site called Killoughane, meaning Church of Lochán, at the eastern end of the Iveragh peninsula. The other possibility is considerably more mundane: that the name simply means island of the chaff. History does not always choose the more compelling answer.

The cross is no longer on the island. It has passed into the care of the Office of Public Works under the National Monuments service, which means it is preserved but no longer in the tidal, windswept context that shaped it. What remains on Illaunloughan itself, and what the excavations gradually uncovered across those four seasons, places this modest channel crossing firmly within the wider world of early medieval Irish monasticism, where small, exposed islands were chosen not despite their difficulty but because of it.