Yet this fragment of garnet mica-schist from High Island, off the Connemara coast of County Galway, carries the unmistakable outline of a cruciform cross, cut without ornament into its surface. It is undecorated, modest in scale, just 32 centimetres tall and 16 centimetres wide, and it survives in pieces. Only one of its side-arms remains, and that one is damaged. There is something quietly affecting about an object so reduced, so close to disappearing entirely.

The slab was found in rubble to the south-west of a structure known as Cell B, a clochan, which is a small dry-stone beehive hut of the kind associated with early Irish monasticism, situated to the east of the island's church. High Island, known in Irish as Ardoileán, was home to an early medieval monastic settlement, and small cross-slabs like this one were commonly erected within such communities, sometimes marking graves, sometimes serving a devotional function within the monastic enclosure. This particular example was recorded by Fisher in 2014, who also raised an intriguing possibility: a separate cross-base recorded nearby may in fact be the lower portion of this very slab, the two pieces of the same broken object lying apart after centuries in the rubble.