A roadside graveyard in Palmerstown, Co. Kildare, holds an unusual distinction: it does not appear as a graveyard at all on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1838, despite the fact that burials were continuing there at the time. The site is compact, roughly rectangular, measuring around 50 metres north-west to south-east and 30 metres across, and contains a medieval church, a font, and a monument known as the Flatesbury Monument. It is also home to a nineteenth-century high cross erected for the Bourke family of County Mayo, and it is the Bourke connection that gives this otherwise quiet plot its most singular story.

Richard Southwell Bourke, the Sixth Earl of Mayo, was born in 1822 and went on to serve as Chief Secretary for Ireland on three separate occasions before being appointed Viceroy of India. In 1872 he was assassinated there, becoming one of very few viceroys to die in office. According to local tradition, his body was transported home preserved in a barrel of rum, a method used in the era before refrigeration to prevent decomposition on long sea voyages. The detail lodged in village memory, and he acquired the enduring nickname "The Pickled Earl". He was buried in the family plot at Palmerstown, beneath the high cross that still marks the Bourke burials today.