Somewhere inside the ruined walls of Tipperkevin Church in County Kildare, three early medieval cross-slabs were once recorded. By the time anyone went back to look, most of them had disappeared. Cross-slabs are among the more understated survivals of early Christian Ireland, flat grave markers or commemorative stones carved with crosses, sometimes incised into the surface, sometimes worked into low relief. They lack the drama of the great high crosses, but they carry their own quiet weight, records in stone of communities that have otherwise left almost nothing behind.

In 1985, a researcher named Healy documented all three slabs at Tipperkevin Church. The first, slab A, was a tapered granite stone nearly two metres long, bearing an incised Greek cross, the kind with arms of equal length, its ends expanded into slightly broader terminals. The second, slab B, was even larger at 1.9 metres, and more elaborate: a single shaft running the length of the stone with a ringed cross carved in relief at each end, meaning the design was raised from the surface rather than simply cut into it. The third, slab C, survived only as a fragment, its lower portion preserving two parallel incised lines that would once have formed the shaft of a cross. When a follow-up visit was made in 1986, only slab C could be found. The interior of the church appeared to have been recently dug out, and slabs A and B had vanished. Two of the three were later published by Healy in 2009, but their physical whereabouts remain uncertain.

The losses at Tipperkevin are not unusual in the broader story of Ireland's early medieval stonework, where fragile records and sporadic site visits often mean that what is recorded one year is gone the next, displaced by clearance, theft, or well-meaning tidying. What is left is a fragment of a fragment, a site where the archaeology of absence has become as telling as the carved stone itself.