St. Brigid's Cathedral in Kildare town holds an unusually dense accumulation of funerary stonework, assembled across seven centuries of commemoration. Cross slabs, grave slabs, decorated stones, and three effigies have been gathered inside the building, forming a kind of compressed record of how the people buried here, or those who commissioned their memorials, understood death, status, and identity from the tenth century through to the seventeenth.

Among the individual pieces documented within the collection is a damaged limestone fragment now housed in the south transept. It measures roughly 64 centimetres long, 48 wide, and 24 deep, and carries a worn marginal inscription in Roman lettering, the surviving portion reading "…RALD ET …". The partial letters suggest a name ending in "rald", and scholars including Bradley and colleagues, writing in 1986, considered it probably a Fitzgerald graveslab. The Fitzgeralds, the great Anglo-Norman dynasty whose power was centred in Kildare, left their mark across this county in stone and architecture, and a worn fragment with a truncated version of the Gerald name they so frequently used fits plausibly into that lineage, even if the identification remains tentative. A marginal inscription of this kind, running around the edge of a slab rather than across its face, was a common medieval convention for recording the name of the deceased and sometimes a prayer for their soul.