A memorial slab in a church wall is not unusual in itself, but the route this particular stone took to get there is. Set into the inner face of the west gable of the church at Cadamstown, Co. Kildare, the rectangular slab, roughly 1.2 metres long and 0.65 metres wide, carries an incised inscription in both Latin and English, dated 1684, dedicated to one Barnabas O'Kelly, along with the O'Kelly crest and coat of arms. What makes its presence here quietly odd is that it was not placed in the wall as part of any original intention. It was dug up.

According to the antiquarian Fitzgerald, writing in 1896, the slab came to light during the construction of an eighteenth-century burial vault for the More-O'Ferrall family. Vaults of this kind were typically cut into the ground beneath or beside a church, and in the process of that excavation, the O'Kelly memorial was unearthed. Rather than discard it, whoever oversaw the work had it built into the church wall, where it has remained ever since. The slab therefore records two distinct moments of burial culture, the seventeenth-century commemoration of Barnabas O'Kelly in 1684, and the eighteenth-century intervention that displaced it and gave it a second, unintended home. The O'Kelly and More-O'Ferrall families both had roots in the wider Leinster region, and their overlapping presence at this small site hints at the complicated patterns of landownership and Catholic memorial practice that persisted through the Penal era. The inscription itself, mixing Latin and English, was a common enough convention for educated Catholic gentry of the period, but the text is now barely legible, worn to the point where reading it requires patience and good light.