Castledermot in County Kildare is already well supplied with early medieval stonework, the kind of place where carved granite high crosses rise from the grass and pilgrims once wore paths into the ground. But tucked among the more celebrated monuments is something considerably quieter: a tapering limestone slab, partly buried, with an incised cross worked into its face. It does not announce itself.

The stone measures just under a metre in length and narrows from around forty centimetres at its widest to twenty-eight at the other end. Cut into its surface is a cross-shaft set on steps, with three circular discs arranged along the stem. The design belongs to a tradition of incised, rather than relief-carved, early Christian stonework, where the image is drawn into the surface with a tool rather than built up from it. The stepped base is a conventional way of representing Calvary, the hill on which the Crucifixion took place, and appears across Irish early medieval stone carving. The three discs are less immediately explained and may carry symbolic weight now difficult to recover. The stone was recorded by Bradley and colleagues in 1986, by which point it was already partially submerged in the ground, meaning the full extent of any further decoration, if it exists, remains unknown.