The body would be brought to it, the mourners would gather, and only then could the cortege continue to the old cemetery for burial. The cross is gone now, or at least unfindable, and precisely where it stood is no longer known.

The source for this fragment of ritual geography is Fr. Shearman, writing between 1866 and 1869, who recorded that a termon cross marked the demesne boundary to the west of a place called Dunboe. A termon cross, in Irish ecclesiastical tradition, was a boundary marker denoting the edge of consecrated or protected church land, the word deriving from the Irish tearmann, meaning sanctuary. Such crosses served a legal and spiritual function simultaneously, defining the zone within which certain protections applied and often regulating the movement of the dead. The practice of halting funeral processions at a fixed point before entering sacred ground was not unusual in medieval Irish Christianity, but the Howth example is notable for having been observed and recorded at all, given how thoroughly it has since vanished from the landscape.

The record compiled by Geraldine Stout, uploaded in August 2011, is candid about the limits of what is known: the exact location of this monument is unknown. That honesty is itself useful information for anyone approaching Howth with an interest in its older layers. The demesne boundary to the west of Dunboe is the only geographical clue available, and even that is approximate. For visitors, there is no marker, no plaque, and no surviving stonework to seek out. What remains is the outline of a practice, the knowledge that this boundary was once meaningful enough that the dead were formally acknowledged at it before being carried onward, and the open question of where, exactly, that threshold lay.