It is not large, measuring just 56 centimetres high and 47 centimetres wide, and only 8 centimetres thick, yet it carries on its exposed face something precise and deliberate: an encircled linear Latin cross, the circle drawn around the crosshead in a form sometimes called a ringed or wheel cross. The flat head and short rounded arms give it a compact, almost compressed appearance, as though it were made to withstand the Atlantic weather rather than to impress.

Skellig Michael, known in Irish as Sceilg Mhichíl, was home to a monastic community whose origins are generally placed in the early medieval period, perhaps as early as the sixth or seventh century. The monks who lived here constructed dry-stone beehive cells, oratories, and terraced gardens on near-vertical rock faces, and they buried their dead in the small graveyard where this cross still stands. A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan, compiling their archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula published by Cork University Press in 1996, recorded the cross as one of a number of carved stones associated with the site. The encircled cross it bears is a motif found widely across early Christian Ireland and Britain, used on everything from large high crosses to small grave markers, though here the execution is linear and unadorned, with none of the elaborate interlace or figural carving found on more celebrated examples elsewhere.