The piece measures just 38 centimetres long and 28 centimetres wide, a rounded cross-head and a single surviving arm, with the second arm and most of the shaft long gone. What remains is thin, only three centimetres thick, and easy to overlook beside grander ecclesiastical stonework. Its modest dimensions, however, say nothing about the place it once belonged to.

The fragment was recovered from the main ecclesiastical complex on the north-eastern peak of Sceilg Mhichíl, the dramatic rock island rising out of the Atlantic roughly twelve kilometres off the coast of County Kerry. Early medieval monks established a monastery there, cutting terraces into sheer cliff faces and constructing dry-stone beehive cells, known as clocháns, which have survived largely intact for well over a thousand years. The cross fragment would have been part of that community's devotional landscape, one of several carved stone markers that gave the site its character as a place of prayer and pilgrimage. At some point it was removed from the island and passed into the care of the Office of Public Works, which now holds it at its National Monuments Depot in Killarney, in County Kerry. Its original location on the island is recorded, placing it firmly within the cluster of structures at the heart of the monastic enclosure.