Inside the parish church of Newcastle in County Waterford, a seventeenth-century chest tomb has come apart from itself. The flat stone lid, measuring roughly 1.9 metres by 1.1 metres, sits in the northeast corner of the church, while the side-panels that once completed the tomb are in the southeast corner. A chest tomb is a box-shaped funerary monument, essentially a raised stone coffin or memorial designed to be seen from all sides, and the decorative panels that form its walls were often carved with religious imagery. In this case, those panels bear symbols of the Passion, the series of objects and scenes associated with the suffering and crucifixion of Christ, a common subject for devotional funerary carving in early modern Ireland.

The tomb commemorates James Ronan of Hacketstown and is dated 1626. How the lid and the side-panels came to occupy opposite corners of the church is not recorded, but the separation suggests a history of disturbance, whether through later building work, deliberate repositioning, or simple neglect. The church sits on a south-facing slope, and the site is not without other points of interest. An octagonal font stands just outside the church to the north, and a castle site lies approximately seventy metres to the northwest, suggesting that this was once a more substantial settlement than its present quiet state might imply.