It is a portable object, made to be carried rather than fixed in the ground, with a rounded head, arms with hollowed angles beneath, and a shaft that tapers towards the base. That combination of modest scale and deliberate craftsmanship places it within a category the excavators called pilgrim crosses, objects presumably used in personal devotion or carried along routes of religious significance.

The island itself, Illaunloughan or Oileán Lócháin, sits barely 120 metres from the mainland, low in the water and close to the village of Portmagee in the barony of Iveragh. Four seasons of archaeological work between 1992 and 1995 uncovered evidence across roughly 70 per cent of the island, and this cross was one of four portable examples found there. The name of the island presents its own small puzzle. It may preserve the memory of a saint called Lochán, a theory given some weight by the Martyrology of Oengus, a ninth-century Irish calendar of saints written around AD 800, which mentions two figures of that name, and by the existence of an ecclesiastical site called Killoughane, meaning the church of Lochán, at the eastern end of the Iveragh peninsula. The alternative reading is more prosaic: the island of the chaff. No historical documentation has been found to settle the question either way.

The cross is one of four portable examples from the site, all catalogued together, and its precise present location is not recorded in the available material. What the excavations did establish is that this small, low-lying island in a sheltered channel once supported a community with enough religious life to produce, use, and presumably transport objects of this kind.