It is easy to walk past. But this piece of shaped stone is a column base, specifically the base for an engaged column, a type of column built into or flush against a wall rather than standing freely, and it dates to the twelfth century. It does not belong to the graveyard. It belongs, or once belonged, to an entirely different kind of place altogether.

The fragment is associated with Owney Cistercian abbey, a medieval monastic foundation whose remains are recorded nearby. The Cistercians, a reform movement within Benedictine monasticism, arrived in Ireland during the twelfth century and introduced a distinctive architectural vocabulary, plain and disciplined in its early phases, but still attentive to the structural detail of column bases, doorways, and arcading. A sandstone column base of this date would once have formed part of that fabric, a small but considered element in a larger stone composition. The detail about the fragment was compiled by Caimin O'Brien and draws on information provided by Colmán Ó Clabaigh of Glenstal Abbey, lending the record a connection to living Cistercian scholarship in the same county.

The fragment now lies up against the base of the western boundary wall in Abington graveyard, close to the south-west angle. Abington graveyard is the kind of place that rewards slow movement and some patience with uneven ground. The column base is not displayed or labelled; it is simply there, resting where it was placed at some point, its original context lost. Visitors with an interest in Romanesque or early Gothic stonework will find it worth crouching down to examine the profile of the base, which preserves the formal geometry of twelfth-century ecclesiastical craft in a piece small enough to overlook entirely.