A granite standing stone that has been quietly accumulating meanings for millennia stands on a low esker in Kilgowan, Co. Kildare, its surface bearing a cross that almost certainly was not there when the stone was first raised. The stone itself is 2.3 metres tall, thin and tapering, wider at the base than at the top, the kind of prehistoric upright that was already ancient when Christianity arrived in Ireland. At some point a cross was incised into its south-western face, and two competing explanations have circulated for why it is there.

The stone sits on an esker, a long ridge of gravel and sand deposited by glacial meltwater, though this particular esker has been partially quarried away over the years. Burials were discovered immediately to the north of the stone in 1987, and the cross may have been cut to mark or sanctify that ground. But a more specific and rather appealing account appears in Meagher's 1936 record, drawing on an earlier source by Walshe from 1931. According to Meagher, writing about events that were already a century old at that point, two Catholic priests, Father Lawlor and Father Cummins, had lived in a garden at Kilgowan crossroads, and one of the two men was personally responsible for cutting the cross into the stone. If that account is accurate, the incision dates to somewhere around the 1830s or earlier, and what looks like an ancient religious symbol is in fact the work of a named, if not precisely identified, individual with a chisel and an intention. The stone itself is protected under a preservation order, and the two layers of meaning, prehistoric monument and post-medieval inscription, sit on the same face without either one cancelling the other out.