Somewhere along the roads of County Kildare, a stone cross once stood at a roadside location in Littlerath, marking a spot that the Ordnance Survey still faithfully recorded on its 1939 six-inch map. That map, however, captures a moment just before the cross disappeared from its original position entirely, relocated to a graveyard some distance away. The site recorded here is essentially a ghost, a place where something once stood that no longer stands there.

The cross was not moved alone. A second roadside cross, which had stood nearby, was taken at the same time, and both were resettled in Sherlockstown Graveyard, where they remain today. Roadside crosses of this kind were a common enough feature of the Irish rural landscape, serving as waymarkers, devotional objects, or memorials, and their removal to graveyards, though well-intentioned as a form of preservation, does mean that the original context, the particular bend of road or field boundary they once punctuated, is lost. What prompted the move in this case, and precisely when it happened, is not recorded here, but the 1939 map date gives a rough upper limit: the crosses were still in place, or at least still remembered as being in place, when that survey was completed.