For generations it was pointed out as the "wart-stone", a hollowed rock reputed, in the way of many such stones across Ireland, to have some curative property. What nobody appears to have recorded until the mid-twentieth century was that the hollow was not worn by weather or worn smooth by supplication; it was deliberately cut to receive the base of a cross or stone pillar, part of which is still seated in the socket.

The stone sits within, or possibly buried within the fosse, a defining ditch or boundary earthwork, at the edge of Saggart graveyard. The site itself may overlie a monastery founded in the seventh century by St Mosacra, which would place the original cross somewhere in the early medieval period of Irish Christianity, when such pillars and carved crosses marked sacred enclosures and acted as focal points for prayer and assembly. The misidentification of the socket stone as a bullaun, a term used for stones bearing rounded cup-shaped depressions that are associated with early monastic sites and sometimes with folk healing practices, is not entirely surprising given that bullaun stones were themselves frequently attributed with curative powers in local tradition. The key distinction, as the archaeologist Seán P. Ó Ríordáin noted in 1947, is the shaped end of the cross or pillar still sitting in position in the socket, around 40 cm of it remaining in place. It was Lord Walter FitzGerald who had earlier mentioned the wart-stone in his notes on Saggart, without apparently noticing what it actually was.

Saggart is a small village in south County Dublin, not far from Rathcoole, and the church and graveyard are accessible without difficulty. The cross base is recorded in the Sites and Monuments Record for Dublin. Visitors should look toward the eastern boundary of the graveyard, where the fosse once defined the edge of the early monastic enclosure. The fragment of the cross or pillar shaft remaining in the socket is modest in scale, and easily overlooked if you are not specifically looking for it, which is perhaps why the wart-stone explanation went unchallenged for so long.