Scattered across an ancient cashel in Gortnagane, Co. Kerry, plain crosses and encircled crosses have been worn into the rock surfaces not by chisel or carving tool but by the slow, repeated friction of human hands and fingers. The act of rubbing a cross into stone is itself the devotion, accumulated visit by visit, generation by generation, until the mark becomes permanent.

The cashel, a type of early medieval stone enclosure typically built to protect a settlement or religious site, bears the name Cathair Craobh Dearg, and its alternative local name, "The City", suggests a place of some long-standing social and spiritual gravity. Pilgrims making "rounds" here, a traditional Irish devotional practice involving a set circuit of prayers performed at specific stations within or around a sacred site, pass through several distinct areas: a holy well to the south, a grotto area to the northeast, and other stopping points along the route. Cross-inscriptions have been observed at all of these stations, meaning the marks are not incidental but tied directly to the structure of the pilgrimage itself. Each rubbed cross is, in a sense, a receipt of passage, left behind by someone who completed a station and pressed their intention into the stone.