Not lost to the sea, not toppled by weather in living memory, but simply absent, leaving behind only the description recorded in 1996 by archaeologists A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan as part of their survey of the Iveragh Peninsula.

The cross, when it was documented, was a small and rough-cut slab of stone measuring just under half a metre in length and barely five centimetres thick, with what the surveyors described as rudimentary arms, the most basic suggestion of a cross-shape worked into the stone rather than any refined carving. It stood near a second stone cross on the same upper terrace, part of the layered monastic landscape that monks began constructing on this Atlantic rock, twelve kilometres off the Kerry coast, possibly as early as the sixth or seventh century. The upper terrace at Skellig Michael sits above the famous beehive cells, the corbelled dry-stone huts (buildings constructed without mortar, where courses of stone are laid so that each slightly overhangs the one below, eventually meeting at a point) that have survived largely intact for over a millennium. Small stone crosses were a common feature of such early Irish monastic enclosures, marking sacred boundaries or stations for prayer. This particular one did not survive long enough to be photographed or drawn in any detail, and by the time the record was revisited, there were no visible remains whatsoever.

What makes the entry quietly arresting is precisely that absence. The cross is recorded in the archaeological literature as a real object with real measurements, and then it is simply gone, a placeholder in the historical record for something that can no longer be verified on the ground.