The monastery they built on Skellig Michael is well known. Less remarked upon is one of its quieter survivals: a stone cross, just 1.2 metres tall, standing on the eastern side of the Monks' Graveyard, a little apart from the more visited features of the site.

The cross is spare and unshowy. It has a rectangular shaft, a flat head, and short squared arms, giving it a blocky, almost severe profile. Between those arms, a Latin cross has been incised directly into the stone, a cross within a cross, the inner one drawn with a tool rather than cut in relief. The overall dimensions, 1.2 metres high, 0.35 metres wide, and just 0.09 metres thick, make it a slender thing to have survived in such a location. The graveyard it guards was used by the monks who lived here, members of an early Christian community who built their beehive-shaped stone huts, known as clochans, by hand on a ledge some 600 feet above sea level. The cross marks the eastern edge of their burial ground, oriented in the way that early Irish monastic practice generally demanded.

Access to Skellig Michael is by licensed boat from the Kerry coast, typically from Portmagee, Ballinskelligs, or Derrynane, and is entirely weather-dependent. The crossing takes roughly an hour and forty minutes at its longest, and the island can be closed for days at a time when conditions deteriorate. Once ashore, visitors climb a steep path of ancient stone steps to reach the monastic enclosure. The Monks' Graveyard sits within that enclosure, and the cross stands to its eastern side, easy to overlook when the more elaborate features of the site compete for attention.