In a graveyard at Rathmore in County Kildare, there sits a small granite stone that barely clears the ground, its most prominent feature a deep rectangular socket cut into its upper surface. That socket, technically called a mortice, is the kind of void left when a standing cross is removed or lost, and this particular one descends more than half a metre into the stone despite the base itself rising only nineteen centimetres above the soil. Locally, though, nobody calls it a cross base. It goes by the name the wart stone, a reminder that holy sites across Ireland accumulated folk uses over centuries, with stones associated with church monuments often credited with the power to cure skin complaints when touched or rubbed.

The stone went unrecorded in any formal survey until 2008, when a local man named Warren Ogden drew attention to its existence. It sits to the south of the old church at Rathmore and is aligned on a north-south axis, a square granite block with slightly rounded corners measuring roughly 44 centimetres by 38 centimetres, with a wedge-shaped mortice narrowing toward a rounded base as it descends. No excavation has been carried out; the only intervention recorded was the clearing of leaf litter from the socket. Brian McCabe of the Naas Local History Group has suggested that a substantially buried, roughly hewn, tapering granite cross found nearby may once have stood in this very base, though the two have not been formally connected through investigation. The possibility that the cross and its base have been separated, perhaps for centuries, and now lie within metres of each other in the same graveyard gives the site an understated kind of suspense.