Castledermot in County Kildare is already well supplied with early medieval stonework, from its round tower to its granite high crosses, so it takes something a little more fragmentary and easy to overlook to catch the attention differently. Among the site's surviving carved stones is a broken limestone slab, modest in size at roughly 74 centimetres long and 32 centimetres wide, that preserves only the faint remains of what it once showed: the stem of a cross raised in relief above a stepped base.

The technique visible on this fragment, where the cross and its platform are carved proud of the surrounding surface rather than incised into it, is a relatively ambitious form of relief sculpture. A cross on steps, sometimes called a cross on a calvary, was a common devotional motif in early Christian and medieval Irish stone carving, the stepped base evoking Golgotha, the hill on which the crucifixion took place. What survives here is only the lower portion of that composition, enough to confirm the design but not enough to recover its full scale or detail. The slab itself is limestone, a material less commonly used for decorated stonework in this part of Kildare than the granite that dominates the better-known monuments nearby, which may hint at a different workshop tradition or date of production. The fragment was catalogued by Bradley and colleagues in 1986.