It is an unassuming object by most measures, just 37 centimetres tall and 46 centimetres wide, barely the dimensions of a large book, yet it occupies one of the more extraordinary burial grounds in the country.

The cross is notable for its hollowed angles, the concave scooping at the junctions where the arms meet the shaft, a feature associated with early medieval Irish stonework. The arms themselves are short, and the top is straight rather than ringed, distinguishing it from the more familiar Celtic cross form most people picture when Irish ecclesiastical stonework comes to mind. It was described in detail by archaeologists Aidan O'Sullivan and John Sheehan in their 1996 survey of the Iveragh Peninsula, which remains a foundational reference for the archaeology of South Kerry. The cross sits within the monastic enclosure of Skellig Michael, a site where early Christian monks built a settlement of dry-stone beehive cells and oratories on a vertiginous Atlantic rock roughly twelve kilometres off the Kerry coast, probably from around the sixth or seventh century onwards.