Set into the south wall of the chancel of Leixlip church, a graveslab quietly holds its ground despite having lost much of its surface to time and flaking stone. It is a round-headed slab, 86 centimetres tall and 48 wide, and what survives is carved in low relief: a skull and crossed bones sitting beneath an equal-armed cross, with an incised inscription in Roman capitals running across what remains of the face. The lettering reads, in part, "HERE LIETH THE BURIAL PLACE OF HENRY … MAY", the middle portion of the name now gone. Below the skull, a few isolated letters, "T…N..O", cling on without enough context to be fully decoded.

The imagery is entirely in keeping with post-medieval funerary conventions common across Ireland and Britain, where the skull and crossbones served not as a symbol of danger but as a memento mori, a reminder of mortality carved deliberately into stone so that the living would pause and reflect. The equal-armed cross above it sits in the same devotional tradition. What distinguishes this slab is less its iconography than its condition and its partial anonymity: the man commemorated was almost certainly a Henry of some kind, with a surname beginning in May, but the stone will not give up the rest. The fragment of letters below the skull may yet preserve his fuller name or a date, but erosion has had the final word, at least for now.