In a graveyard at Rathmore in County Kildare, a stone cross lies flat on the ground, broken and no longer upright, as though it simply gave up standing at some point in the past several centuries. What remains is a shaft rather than a complete cross, octagonal in section and tapering along its length, cut from limestone and measuring just over a metre long. The octagonal form is worth pausing over: it is an unusual choice, departing from the more common circular or square-sectioned shafts, and suggests a degree of craft and intention in the original commission that the fragment's current, prostrate condition does little to advertise.

Beyond its dimensions, recorded as roughly 1.02 metres in length and between 0.2 and 0.24 metres in width, little is documented about who erected it or when. It sits among the dead in a graveyard, as such crosses typically did, marking sacred ground or a point of devotion within a burial enclosure. The fragmented state implies some earlier disturbance, whether deliberate, accidental, or simply the slow work of time and ground movement. Limestone, common across much of Kildare, weathers and fractures readily, and a shaft left without its head or base is vulnerable to settling and toppling over generations.