The object itself is modest: roughly shaped, damaged, measuring less than half a metre in length, with a single surviving arm and a rounded head that is largely missing. Only the shaft remains essentially intact. Its plainness is part of the point. The monks who carved it were not making art for public display; they were marking sacred space on a windswept ledge above the ocean.

The cross originally stood on the outer terrace on the steep, west-facing slopes of the South Peak of Sceilg Mhichíl, the extraordinary early medieval monastery built on a pyramidal rock roughly twelve kilometres off the Kerry coast. Skellig Michael, as it is also known, was occupied by monks from at least the sixth or seventh century, and the community there carved and placed stone markers across the terraces and paths of the site as part of their devotional landscape. This particular cross was recorded at its original location on those rocky slopes, catalogued by researchers including Walter Horn and others in their 1990 study of the Skellig. At some point it was removed for safekeeping and placed in the care of the Office of Public Works, which holds it at its National Monuments Depot in Killarney. Its worn condition, the missing head, the single arm jutting from the shaft, all speak to the exposure it endured on those Atlantic-facing slopes before it was brought ashore.