Inside St. Brigid's Cathedral in Kildare town, propped against the eastern gable wall, sits a worn rectangular fragment of stone that raises more questions than it answers. Measuring roughly half a metre in each direction and only fifteen centimetres thick, it carries two Roman capitals, C.D., and a partial date that resolves only as far as 161-something, the final digit lost to time and wear. The lettering is cut in false relief, a technique in which the background is lowered so that the inscription appears to stand proud of the surface without actually being carved in the round. It is a small, unassuming object, easy to overlook in a building that holds a great deal else.

The slab belongs to a much larger gathering of funerary stonework assembled within the cathedral, a collection that spans roughly seven centuries, from the 10th to the 17th. Cross slabs, grave slabs, decorated stones, and three effigies have all been brought together here, making the cathedral something of an archive in stone for the region's medieval and early modern commemorative tradition. The fragment with the C.D. inscription was documented by Bradley and colleagues in their 1986 survey, which identified the date as falling somewhere in the second decade of the 1600s, though whether the final digit is a six, an eight, or a nine cannot now be determined. The initials themselves remain unattributed; whoever C.D. was, they left only these two letters and an approximate year.