In the grounds of Kilkea Castle in County Kildare, a seventeenth-century stone cross stands in an arcaded enclosure that was purpose-built to receive it, and several others like it. The cross did not originate here. It was brought from Narraghbeg, a townland nearby, and installed as part of a deliberate act of collection rather than emerging organically from the landscape around it.

The person responsible was Lord Walter FitzGerald, who gathered a number of displaced or vulnerable monuments and arranged them together in this sheltered arcade to the south-west of the castle. FitzGerald, a member of the prominent Kildare family long associated with the area, was acting in a tradition of antiquarian stewardship that became more common among landed gentry from the nineteenth century onward, the impulse being to preserve objects that might otherwise be lost to field clearance, neglect, or dispersal. The result is something slightly unusual in the Irish landscape: not a monument in its original context, but a kind of curated assembly, where objects from different origins share a space that was expressly made for them. The Narraghbeg cross, dateable to the seventeenth century, would have been a relatively modest piece of vernacular religious stonework in its own time, the sort of wayside or boundary cross that once marked parish edges, pilgrimage routes, or simply the devotional habits of local communities.