It came from Sceilg Mhichíl, the remote, wave-battered island off the tip of the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry, and it measures just ten centimetres long and ten centimetres wide. What survives is the shaft and part of one arm. The head is gone. Where the missing arm once met the shaft, there is a slightly hollowed angle in the stone, a faint shadow of the join that no longer exists.

Sceilg Mhichíl, known in English as Skellig Michael, was home to one of the most severe early Christian monastic settlements in Ireland, founded at some point in the early medieval period on a rock that rises sharply from the Atlantic. The monks who lived there built in stone out of necessity, and small personal or devotional crosses were a common part of that material culture. This particular cross, catalogued under its original island location, was at some stage removed from the site and is now held at the National Monuments Depot in Killarney, in Carrigafreaghane. Its present address is, in a sense, a bureaucratic footnote to the island's more celebrated archaeology, yet the object itself carries the particular quality of things that have been handled, moved, and quietly set aside. At ten millimetres thick, it would have sat easily in a palm.