Somewhere in Ballynadrumny graveyard in County Kildare, or possibly nowhere at all now, there is, or was, a graveslab carrying a Latin inscription for a man named Patrick Sherlock. The date on it was only partly legible when it was last formally noted, reading "155?" as the final digit had already worn or been obscured beyond recovery. That places Sherlock somewhere in the mid-sixteenth century, a period when Latin memorial inscriptions on flat grave markers were a mark of modest local distinction, used to record the name, lineage, and occasionally the virtues of the deceased for anyone who could read the script. The slab itself has not been confirmed in its location since.

The record of this monument comes from Fitzgerald, writing between 1899 and 1902, who noted it as lying a short distance to the south of the church ruins in the graveyard. At that point it was still present, still readable enough to transcribe, and still associated with a specific family name and place. Patrick Sherlock of Ballindrumny is otherwise unattested in any detail that has survived alongside the monument itself, which means the slab was, in practical terms, the entire evidence of his existence. Since Fitzgerald's time, the exact location of the slab has become unknown. It may have been displaced, buried under subsidence, broken up, or simply missed in later surveys. The graveyard and the nearby church ruins remain, but the inscription that once gave one sixteenth-century Kildare man a name and a date has slipped out of the record.