In the townland of Gardens in County Kilkenny, two tombstones came to light beneath the foundations of a building, one of them bearing an incised cross, the simple kind of grave marker cut directly into the stone surface rather than worked in relief. Finding funerary stones reused or buried within later construction is not unheard of in Ireland, but it is always a quietly unsettling discovery, suggesting that the memory of whoever lay beneath had already been lost before the building above them was even begun.

The two slabs were recorded together, and the one with the incised cross is the more visually legible of the pair. Incised crosses on graveslabs are among the oldest and most widespread forms of Christian funerary marking in Ireland, running from the early medieval period well into the post-Norman centuries, though without further detail it is difficult to assign this particular stone to any precise era. What is clear is that by the time the building whose foundations buried them was constructed, the slabs had already been displaced from whatever grave or memorial context they once occupied, their original purpose either forgotten or simply disregarded.