Within the ruined church at Tipperkevin in County Kildare, a set of early medieval cross-slabs once sat in quiet accumulation, the kind of carved stones that tend to get overlooked precisely because they are not standing crosses or elaborate high crosses but flat grave markers, worn and easy to miss. What makes this particular group unusual is not just the quality of the carving but the way the group itself seems to have partially dissolved between one recorded visit and the next, raising questions about disturbance, displacement, and what exactly was happening inside the church walls.

In 1985, a researcher named Healy documented three granite cross-slabs at the site. The first, a tapered slab nearly two metres long, carried an incised Greek cross, a design where all four arms are of equal length, with the ends of the arms splayed outward. The second was slightly larger, at 1.9 metres, and bore a more elaborate design: a single shaft with a ringed cross at each end, carved in relief rather than simply incised into the surface. The third was a fragment, the lower portion of a slab with two parallel incised lines marking the shaft of a cross, its upper section lost. All three were made from local granite. When the same site was visited in 1986, just a year later, only the fragmentary third slab could be found. The interior of the church had apparently been recently dug out, and the two more complete slabs had vanished from view. Two of the slabs were later published by Healy in 2009, suggesting some continued scholarly interest, but the fate of the carved stones in physical terms remains unresolved by what survives of the record.