At Lullymore West in County Kildare, a small and partly damaged stone cross stands not where it was made, nor where it first served its purpose, but folded into the fabric of a memorial to an entirely different chapter of Irish history. The cross, barely 29 centimetres tall and 30 centimetres wide, is one of nine pieces of early Christian stonework that were lifted from the ancient ecclesiastical site at Lullymore East and repositioned around a local memorial commemorating the 1798 rebellion. It is an unusual kind of layering, early medieval devotional objects repurposed as backdrop or ornament for a monument separated from them by perhaps a thousand years of history.

Lullymore East appears to have been a site of some significance in the early monastic period, producing not just this cross but at least six other cross-inscribed stones, flat or shaped pieces of rock bearing incised cross motifs that were a common form of devotional or commemorative marking at early Irish religious settlements. The small cross now at Lullymore West is catalogued as 'Cross 9' in M. Kelly's 2006 study of the material, which identified the probable original location of this particular piece within the monastic enclosure at Lullymore East. A further cross-inscribed stone from the same general area was separated from the rest of the group and moved to the nearby Bog of Allen Nature Centre Museum, meaning that what was once a coherent assemblage on a single site is now distributed across at least two locations a short distance apart.