It is slab 50 in a collection of early medieval cross-slabs gathered at a site called St. Berrihert's Kyle, and what makes it worth pausing over is precisely its modesty: a faint outlined cross with a very short shaft, lightly pocked into a surface so irregular that the carving seems almost reluctant. Turn it over, and the back is entirely blank.

St. Berrihert's Kyle is an ecclesiastical enclosure in Ardane, County Tipperary, associated with an early Christian saint. The cross-slab itself belongs to a tradition of simple incised or pocked stone markers common in early medieval Ireland, where a basic cross form, sometimes little more than an outline, was sufficient to sanctify a stone or mark a grave. The oval stone enclosure in which the slabs are now gathered was built by the Office of Public Works in 1946, a mid-twentieth century act of curation that consolidated what had been a dispersed and vulnerable collection into a stepped, walled setting. The scholar Ó hÉailidhe documented the collection in 1967, cataloguing this particular piece among the group and noting its dimensions and the looseness that allows the blank reverse to be examined directly.