On the west doorway of an old church here, carved into the underside of the lintel, a Latin cross has been cut into the stone. The soffit, which is the inner face of an overhead architectural element such as a lintel or arch, is not the most obvious place to look for early Christian decoration, which is precisely what makes this one easy to miss.

The carving takes the form of a simple Latin cross, the vertical arm longer than the horizontal, incised directly into the stone rather than applied as ornament. Inscribed crosses of this kind were a common feature of early ecclesiastical sites across Ireland, used to sanctify doorways, boundary stones, and grave slabs. Their precise dating is often difficult, but their placement on a threshold carries an obvious symbolic logic, marking the point of transition into sacred space. The site details were compiled by Geraldine Stout and Padraig Clancy, with a revised record uploaded in April 2018.

The church sits along Marino Avenue West, which leads east off the Killiney Hill road. The inscription itself is on the lintel of the western doorway of the nave, on the underside surface, so a visitor needs to look up and inward rather than straight ahead. The cross is not signposted or spotlit; it asks for the kind of deliberate looking that most architectural details never receive. Coming from the Killiney Hill road, the avenue is a modest approach for what turns out to be a genuinely old survival embedded in an otherwise ordinary suburban setting.