At 1.82 metres long and 0.73 metres wide, it is a substantial object, and its lower angles are roughly hollowed out in a manner typical of early medieval Irish stone crosses. What is quietly striking about it is the gap between what it once was and what it has become: a cross that once stood upright, marking the outer threshold of one of Europe's most extraordinary early Christian monasteries, now resting in fragments.

A nineteenth-century engraving published by Dunraven in 1875 shows the cross standing close to the guesthouse building, which gives some sense of how it would have read in the landscape, a vertical landmark at the edge of the monastic enclosure before visitors entered the community proper. By the time O'Sullivan and Sheehan recorded it in 1996, it had already fallen and broken, lying against the north wall of the guesthouse. Since then it has shifted further, and both pieces now rest flat on the ground within the building itself. The guesthouse, as its name suggests, is thought to have served as a reception or transitional space for those arriving at the monastery, which was founded by monks in the early medieval period, perhaps as early as the sixth or seventh century, on a crag of rock rising sharply from the sea some twelve kilometres off the Kerry coast.