Measuring just sixteen centimetres in length and fifteen across, it is a modest object in purely physical terms, yet its scale is almost appropriate to the place it came from: the beehive-hut monastery of Sceilg Mhichíl was itself a study in compression, its monks fitting a complete spiritual life into a ledge of land barely large enough to stand on.

The cross was recovered from the main ecclesiastical complex on the island's north-east peak and is now held at the Office of Public Works National Monuments Depot in Killarney, well away from the salt air and Atlantic weather that surrounded it for centuries. What survives is fragmentary: two short arms, one of them partially damaged, and a rounded head. The shaft is missing entirely, which means we see only the upper portion of what was once a complete form. Stone crosses of this type, small and portable, were common in early Irish monasticism, used for personal devotion, as grave markers, or as focal points within a monastic enclosure. Whether this one served any of those purposes on Skellig is not recorded, only that it was found among the remains of the complex where monks lived and prayed from perhaps the sixth or seventh century onwards.