On the Curragh of Kildare, a flat limestone block lies on the ground beside a small heap of rubble, all that remains of what was once a standing cross. The block itself is roughly a metre long and not quite half a metre deep, with a shallow rectangular mortice cut into its surface, the socket into which a stone cross would originally have been fitted. That cross is long gone, but the pedestal has acquired a second life and a second name: the Wart Stone, suggesting a folk tradition of rubbing or touching the stone for the cure of warts, a practice attached to many old stones and holy wells across Ireland.

The rubble beside the block appears to have been its original base, and it has been tentatively identified with a feature described as a "very small mound" in nineteenth-century Ordnance Survey letters. More intriguingly, it may be the same object as "Richard Fitzgerald's cross", cited in 1591 as a boundary marker for the mearing, or division line, of lands at Rathbride. Using a named cross to define the edge of an estate was common enough in late medieval Ireland, and the Fitzgeralds, the great Kildare dynasty, had deep roots in this part of the county. If the identification holds, this modest block was already old enough by the sixteenth century to serve as a fixed point in the landscape, something permanent enough that surveyors and landowners could rely on it to settle a dispute about where one man's ground ended and another's began.