Somewhere in the bogland of Lullymore, in County Kildare, a cross-inscribed stone was once set into the ground, though the spot is now described only as a presumed original location, which quietly tells you something about how easily the physical anchors of early Christian devotion can come loose from the landscape over centuries.

The stone is catalogued as 'Cross 5' in M. Kelly's 2006 study of the area's early medieval carved stones, a body of work that traced multiple cross-inscribed stones associated with the Lullymore monastic site. Cross-inscribed stones, sometimes simple incised crosses cut into a slab or boulder, are among the earliest physical markers of Christian presence in Ireland, predating the elaborate high crosses of the ninth and tenth centuries. Lullymore itself sits within an area of the Bog of Allen long associated with early ecclesiastical activity, and the presence of several such stones in the vicinity points to a community that marked its sacred landscape methodically, even if the precise original positions of some stones are now a matter of inference rather than certainty.