There is no name on it, no date, no inscription of any kind. What remains is the faint, weathered outline of a ringed cross, its shaft running the full length of the sub-rectangular stone, worn so smooth by centuries of exposure that it takes a moment of careful looking before the carving resolves itself into something legible.

The slab sits in the graveyard of St Werburgh's Church, one of Dublin's oldest parish churches, in the south city. A ringed cross, sometimes called a Celtic cross, is a form in which a circle intersects the arms of the cross, a design with deep roots in early Christian stonework across Ireland and Britain. This particular example is dated on stylistic grounds to the 13th or 14th century, placing it in the medieval period when Dublin was a walled Anglo-Norman city and St Werburgh's was already an established place of worship. The attribution comes from Joe Cully, who photographed the stone and communicated his assessment in October 2014, with the record compiled by Paul Walsh shortly afterwards. Without an inscription, nothing is known about who lies beneath it, and the absence of any identifying text is itself notable; many graveslabs of this period did carry Latin epitaphs or the names of clergy and minor nobility, making the silence here all the more conspicuous.

St Werburgh's Church stands on Werburgh Street, a short walk from Dublin Castle, and the churchyard is accessible from that approach. The slab is located in the south-east section of the graveyard, near the eastern boundary wall, which gives you a reasonably precise area to search in what is not a large space. The carving is genuinely hard to read, particularly in flat or overcast light; an angled morning light, when shadows fall across the surface, is the most useful condition for picking out the cross outline. There is no marker drawing attention to it, so the experience of finding it is largely a matter of patience and a willingness to crouch down and look.