Somewhere in the grounds of Kilkea Demesne in County Kildare, there ought to be three stone heraldic shields, carved in 1573 and bearing the arms of two of the most consequential families in late medieval Leinster. There is also supposed to be a carved monkey panel. None of them can be found.

The shields, as recorded by Bradley and colleagues in 1986, displayed the combined arms of the Browne and FitzGerald families, a pairing that speaks to the overlapping networks of Anglo-Norman and Hiberno-Norman power that shaped this part of Kildare across several centuries. The FitzGeralds, Earls of Kildare, had a long and often turbulent relationship with the Crown, and by 1573 the family was navigating the pressures of Tudor consolidation in Ireland. Armorial plaques of this kind, carved stone panels displaying a family's coat of arms, were a standard way of asserting ownership, alliance, or commemoration on a building or boundary. The monkey panel noted alongside the shields is harder to categorise without more context, though carved animal imagery, sometimes heraldic and sometimes decorative, was not uncommon in stonework of this period. By the time Synnot wrote about the pieces in 1973, they were already recorded as missing, and subsequent scholarship has not located them.