Tucked into an arcaded area south-west of Kilkea Castle, a seventeenth-century heraldic shield bearing the FitzGerald arms sits not quite where history left it. It was moved there deliberately, gathered alongside other monuments by Lord Walter FitzGerald, who assembled the collection as a kind of open-air repository for displaced stonework from the demesne.

The FitzGeralds, Earls of Kildare, were among the most powerful dynasties in late medieval and early modern Ireland, and heraldic shields of this kind were a standard means of asserting lineage and territorial authority, carved in stone and fixed to buildings or boundary structures where they could be seen and read. An armorial plaque is essentially a sculpted coat of arms, intended to identify ownership and communicate status to anyone who passed. The particular shield at Kilkea dates to the seventeenth century, by which point the FitzGerald grip on Kildare had weathered considerable upheaval, including the attainder of the eighth and ninth earls and the destruction of Maynooth Castle in 1535. That a piece of carved FitzGerald stonework survived into the modern era at Kilkea, one of the family's oldest seats, is perhaps less surprising than the fact that someone thought carefully enough about its preservation to give it a permanent home.