Measuring just 0.33 metres wide, this medieval cross-base bears a Latin inscription that translates as "In this sign you shall conquer", the words traditionally associated with the Emperor Constantine's vision before the Battle of Milvian Bridge in 312 AD, the moment that set Christianity on its path to becoming the dominant faith of the Roman world. That such a compact, unassuming object should carry that particular phrase gives it a weight disproportionate to its size.

The cross-base turned up not in a church or a graveyard but in a garden at Carron, in the Burren region of County Clare. How it came to be there, and where it stood before that, is entirely unknown. It is catalogued without a confirmed original location, which is itself a kind of historical curiosity: an object with a clear purpose and a legible inscription, yet no traceable provenance. The museum label proposes that it functioned as the base for a processional cross, the kind of cross that would have been carried at the head of a religious procession rather than fixed permanently in place. If that is correct, the object was designed to be mobile, which makes its eventual disappearance from the record slightly less surprising, if no less frustrating.

The piece is held at Clare Museum in Ennis, where visitors can see it directly. Given how little survives of its story, the inscription is really all it has to speak with, and it does so plainly and without ceremony.