A carved mantelpiece surviving in Kildare town carries a date of 1619 and a family name that once carried considerable weight across Leinster. The piece is attributed to the Fitzgeralds, the great Anglo-Norman dynasty whose branches controlled much of the province through the medieval and early modern periods, and it did not begin its life where it now sits.

According to Bradley and colleagues, writing in 1986, the mantelpiece was originally installed in Ballyshannon Castle, a Fitzgerald stronghold in County Kildare. At some point after its carving it was removed from the castle and relocated, the kind of displacement that was not unusual for decorative stonework when buildings fell into ruin or changed hands. Mantelpieces of this period were often substantial pieces of craftsmanship, sometimes bearing heraldic devices or carved ornament that identified the family who commissioned them, and their survival in any form is relatively uncommon. That this one retains both its date and its attribution makes it a precise, if modest, fragment of early seventeenth-century Fitzgerald domestic life, preserved outside its original architectural context.