They are graveslabs, almost certainly, but their date remains undetermined, which gives them a quietly unsettling quality. In a building where so much of the architectural fabric can be examined and categorised, these stones resist easy explanation.

Ardfert, in north Kerry, was one of the most significant ecclesiastical centres in early and medieval Ireland, associated first with St Brendan the Navigator and later developed as a cathedral town and monastic settlement. The Franciscan friary was founded in the medieval period, and its church has survived in enough structural form to give a clear sense of the space these slabs inhabit. The nine limestone slabs were recorded as a group in the Urban Archaeology Survey of County Kerry, compiled by Bradley, Halpin and King, which noted their presence on the church floor without being able to assign them a specific period. Limestone was the common material for funerary monuments across Munster throughout the medieval and early modern centuries, but without decoration, inscription, or stratigraphic evidence, these particular examples remain chronologically open. Each slab is catalogued individually as a separate monument, suggesting that despite their shared anonymity they are treated with some archaeological seriousness.