Among the eighteenth-century headstones at Dunmanoge in County Kildare, two granite graveslabs sit without explanation. They carry no names, no dates, nothing but a incised Latin cross on each face. Nobody is certain when they were made or who they mark.

The graveyard itself is roughly circular in plan, about sixty metres across, enclosed by a modern wall, with the remains of a church standing inside it. The subcircular shape is worth noting: enclosed burial grounds of this form often reflect much earlier origins, sometimes pre-Norman, following the outline of a ringfort or early ecclesiastical enclosure that was repurposed over centuries. The majority of the visible memorials here belong to the 1700s, a period when carved headstones became more common in rural Irish parishes. But those two granite slabs belong to a different tradition, one that cannot currently be dated with any precision. Granite graveslabs inscribed with a simple cross are known from medieval Ireland, though the form persisted in some regions well beyond that period, which makes attribution difficult without further evidence.

The two undated slabs are easy to overlook among the more legible eighteenth-century stones, but they reward a closer look precisely because they resist explanation.