It stands outside the lintelled entrance to the main terrace, a metre tall and just under thirty centimetres wide, carved with a Latin cross in a simple linear style. What makes it quietly arresting is a detail easy to miss: the base of the cross shaft sits enclosed within a rough ovoid, an oval outline incised into the stone that frames the foot of the cross like a seed or an eye. It is not decorative flourish so much as deliberate marking, a threshold signal cut into rock at the point where the monastic enclosure begins.

Sceilg Mhichíl, a pyramidal rock rising out of the Atlantic roughly twelve kilometres off the Kerry coast, was home to an early Christian monastic community that lived and prayed in conditions that defy easy description. Cross-slabs of this kind were a common feature of early Irish monasteries, functioning as boundary markers, grave indicators, or focuses for devotion, often placed at significant points around a site. A Latin cross carved in linear style, without ornament or relief carving, is among the oldest and most straightforward forms found on such slabs. The ovoid enclosing the shaft base is less common and adds a layer of local character to what might otherwise read as a standard early medieval marker. The slab's dimensions, recorded by archaeologists Aidan O'Sullivan and John Sheehan in their 1996 survey of the Iveragh Peninsula, are modest: one metre high, sixteen centimetres thick, the cross incised on the south-west face where it would catch the light from the direction of the open sea.