The monument looks every inch like a tomb. But no one is buried beneath it. It is a cenotaph, a memorial erected in honour of people interred somewhere else entirely, and that quiet displacement gives it an odd, slightly unsettled quality that most visitors pass without noticing.

The figures commemorated are Roland FitzEustace, Lord Portlester, who died in 1496, and his wife Margaret Jenico. The monument was originally positioned in the chancel aisle chapel of St Audeon's, a more prominent and liturgically significant location than where it now sits. Despite the Dublin setting of the memorial, both Roland and Margaret were buried at New Abbey in Kilcullen, County Kildare. The reasons for this separation of monument and burial are not recorded in what survives, but the practice was not unheard of among the medieval Anglo-Irish nobility, for whom the choice of burial site carried considerable spiritual and dynastic weight. A cenotaph of this kind would have served as a focal point for prayers and commemoration within the Dublin parish, maintaining the family's presence and prestige in the city even as their bodies lay elsewhere.

St Audeon's stands on Cornmarket in the Liberties, and the surviving medieval fabric, including the tower where the Portlester monument is now kept, is managed by the Office of Public Works. The church is open to visitors during the summer months, though it is worth checking current opening hours before making the trip. The monument itself rewards close attention: the horned headdress worn by Margaret Jenico is a distinctive late-medieval fashion, and the quality of the carving on the granite slab speaks to the status of the family it commemorates. The broader church complex also contains one of the few remaining sections of the old city wall, so there is more than one layer of history to take in on the same visit.