Tucked into the internal face of the south wall of the nave at Kilteel church in County Kildare, a small flat stone carries a cross enclosed within a circle, the whole thing modest in scale, measuring just 55 centimetres long and 30 centimetres high, with the encircling ring no wider than 16 centimetres across. It would be easy to overlook entirely, yet this is precisely the kind of object that rewards a second look. It came to light not through excavation but during conservation work on the building, discovered where it had been incorporated, face inward, into the fabric of the wall.

The stone's original purpose is the more intriguing question. Writing in the early 1980s, the archaeologist Manning proposed that it may once have functioned as a consecration cross, a marker placed at the point where a bishop formally blessed a new church, typically positioned above the entrance. In this case, Manning suggested it would have sat above the lintelled west doorway of the earliest stone church on the site, a doorway framed by a single flat stone laid horizontally across the top, a construction type associated with early medieval Irish ecclesiastical architecture. At some later point, when the nave was extended and the building altered, the stone was reused as ordinary building material, its inscribed face turned towards the wall rather than outward. Such recycling of earlier carved or marked stones within later construction is not unusual in Irish ecclesiastical sites, where phases of building often absorbed whatever material was close to hand.