Sitting in Sherlockstown graveyard in County Kildare is a limestone block that has spent most of its existence somewhere else entirely. It is a square base, roughly a metre across and sixty centimetres high, with a chamfered upper surface and a worn inscription from which only the words "me fecet" remain legible, a mangled or abbreviated form of the Latin "me fecit", meaning "made me". Whatever once stood on top of it, almost certainly a wayside cross, is long gone.

The base appears on Noble and Keenan's 1752 map of County Kildare, which marks two wayside crosses standing about a mile to the north, along the road between Sherlockstown and Straffan. Wayside crosses were a common feature of the medieval and early modern Irish landscape, erected at roadsides as markers, memorials, or aids to devotion for travellers. By the time a writer named Sherlock surveyed the area in the early 1890s, the crosses themselves had already disappeared and only the bases remained. Even then, the larger of the two had been moved from its original roadside position to a farmyard at a property called Prospect, described as nearly opposite the spot where it had formerly stood. At some later point, both bases were relocated again, this time to Sherlockstown graveyard, where they have remained. The object in the graveyard today is therefore a fragment of a fragment, a base without its cross, displaced twice over, carrying an inscription that no longer yields a full sentence.