Somewhere in the graveyard of St. Michael's Church in Athy, County Kildare, lies a seventeenth-century graveslab commemorating a Captain Robert Pearson. The difficulty is that nobody knows exactly where. The precise location of the monument has not been established, leaving it in a curious archival limbo: recorded, referenced, yet effectively lost among the stones.

The slab's existence was noted by a researcher named Carroll and later cited by Bradley and colleagues in a 1986 survey of the area. Beyond that brief mention, the historical record falls quiet. Captain Robert Pearson himself remains an elusive figure; his rank suggests a military connection, plausible enough in a seventeenth-century Irish town that saw considerable upheaval during the Confederate and Cromwellian wars of that period. A graveslab of this era would typically be a flat recumbent stone, sometimes carved with heraldic devices, lettering, or symbolic imagery such as a skull or hourglass, laid directly over or near a burial. Whether Pearson's slab retains any such decoration, or whether it has been worn smooth, broken, or simply overgrown, remains unknown.