A small piece of sandstone, barely thirty centimetres long, carries a Latin cross whose arms terminate in neat T-shaped ends, a form sometimes called a crosslet or hammer-headed cross, with the foot spreading into a slight splay at its base. What makes it quietly remarkable is not only the quality of its carving on such a rough, irregularly shaped fragment, but the distance it has travelled from its original context, almost certainly an early medieval monastic enclosure, to its current resting place in a memorial with a very different purpose.

The stone is one of a group of at least nine carved stones and crosses that were removed from the early ecclesiastical site at Lullymore East in County Kildare and incorporated into a memorial commemorating the 1798 Rebellion, located in the nearby townland of Lullymore West. The reuse of early Christian carved stonework within a commemorative structure of that kind gives the memorial an unusual layered quality: ancient monastic material pressed into service for a modern act of remembrance. This particular stone, catalogued as 'Cross 4' by the researcher M. Kelly in 2006, is presumed to have originated from the same early monastic complex before its removal. A further cross-inscribed stone from the same site was dispersed in a different direction entirely, finding its way into the collection of the Bog of Allen Nature Centre Museum nearby.

The 1798 memorial in Lullymore West provides the current setting for most of the displaced stones. Visitors interested in the pre-Norman ecclesiastical history of the Kildare boglands will find that the carved material here represents what survives above ground from a monastic community whose physical remains are otherwise largely buried or lost. The Bog of Allen Nature Centre Museum in Lullymore is also worth seeking out for the additional stone held there, and it offers broader context for the remarkable archaeological landscape of this part of the Irish midlands.