Beside the eastern pier of a graveyard entrance in Kilcock, a small, roughly dressed block of stone sits quietly in place, carrying the weight of a practice that speaks to a particular kind of institutional pressure on the Catholic poor. Local tradition holds that funeral parties were once required to wait outside the graveyard gates until burial fees had been settled, and that the coffin was rested on this stone in the meantime. The dead, in other words, were held at the threshold as a matter of economic procedure.

The tradition is recorded by Simms (1999), who identifies the rough stone beside the east gate pier as the coffin-resting stone in question. The context is the graveyard at Kilcock, where Catholic burials were subject to the payment of fees before interment could proceed. A competing account, offered by Rochfort (1999), points elsewhere entirely: a cross base, a stone socket that would originally have supported a standing cross, once located at the edge of the Fair Green in Kilcock, is said by Rochfort to have served the same function. Whether the two traditions describe different periods, different practices, or simply different memories of the same custom is not entirely clear. What the disagreement does suggest is that the coffin-resting stone, as an object, mattered enough to local memory that its identity was actively recalled and debated rather than simply forgotten.