The object itself is remarkably small, measuring just eleven centimetres in length and nine centimetres wide, roughly the size of a large hand. Its two arms are rounded, each with a rounded angle cut beneath them, and the shaft widens gently as it descends toward the base. The upper portion of the head is gone, broken away at some point in its long history.

The cross originated on Sceilg Mhichíl, the pyramid of rock rising from the Atlantic roughly twelve kilometres off the coast of County Kerry, where early Christian monks established a monastery that clung to the island's upper reaches, probably from around the sixth or seventh century. Objects from such sites occasionally find their way into institutional care when they are considered too fragile or too vulnerable to remain in situ, and this cross is now held by the Office of Public Works at the National Monuments Depot in Killarney. Its diminutive scale raises quiet questions about its original purpose and placement on an island where even survival required extraordinary effort. Small carved crosses of this kind are not uncommon in early Irish monasticism, where they could serve as personal devotional objects, grave markers, or boundary indicators within a monastic enclosure.