A ringed granite cross standing 3.4 metres tall in a County Kildare graveyard carries two distinct histories at once. The cross itself is almost certainly pre-1200 in date, making it a medieval high cross of the kind that once marked monastic sites and ecclesiastical boundaries across Ireland. But carved in Roman capitals on its west face, running anticlockwise around the stone, is a later inscription that reads: AMEN, NORTH CROSS ERECTED IN 1689 BY AM WALL, IHS. Someone in the late seventeenth century went to the trouble of raising this ancient cross back upright and recording the fact on the stone itself, leaving a kind of palimpsest: a medieval monument annotated by a post-Reformation hand.

The cross stands to the north of a nineteenth-century church, but the story of what lies beneath it is arguably stranger than what is visible above ground. When the cross began to lean badly, a small archaeological excavation was carried out in 1999 to allow it to be re-erected safely. What emerged was an unusually improvised base: a large granite boulder, crudely worked into a stepped pyramidal shape on its upper surface, propped on the east side with stones and mortar because it sat at an angle on the natural ground. The shaft itself had no tenon, the peg that would ordinarily anchor it firmly into its socket, and instead sat loosely in a mortice that narrowed partway down, preventing the shaft from seating securely. The gap between shaft and socket had accumulated soil, dead leaves, water, and, unexpectedly, an old iron key, most likely belonging to the church door at some point. Finds recovered from around the base, including two sherds of medieval pottery, slag, a bronze binding strip, and animal bone, point to some form of occupation in the area before it became a graveyard.