Measuring just thirty centimetres high and thirty-one centimetres wide, with a thickness of five centimetres, it is a fragment of a thing, its lower shaft broken away at some point in the past, leaving it truncated and blunt against the rock. What it lacks in scale it more than compensates for in age and context: this is a working object from a monastic community that chose one of the most inhospitable outcrops in the North Atlantic as the site of their devotional life.

The cross stands in the Monks' Graveyard on the island, a place where the community buried its dead in the same spare, unadorned manner in which they appear to have done everything else. Its rounded head and short arms place it within a broader tradition of early Irish stone crosses, which ranged from elaborate high crosses covered in scriptural carving to simple incised slabs and rough-hewn forms like this one. The lack of ornament here is not absence so much as intention; the monastery on Skellig Michael, founded sometime in the early medieval period and inhabited by monks for several centuries, produced material culture that was functional and austere. A cross of this kind would have marked a grave or served as a focal point for prayer, its modest size no measure of its significance to those who placed it there.