During conservation work at Kilteel church in County Kildare, a fragment of carved stone turned up outside the southern wall of the nave, the kind of quiet discovery that rarely makes headlines but carries considerable weight. It is a portion of a coffin-shaped graveslab, the tapered outline alone enough to signal its purpose, but what lifts it above a plain piece of broken masonry is the carving: two hollow mouldings running along the chamfered edges, and a raised stem traced up the centre.

Slabs of this type, with their moulded borders and central stem or foliate decoration, were a recognisable feature of high medieval funerary stonework in Ireland. This example is dated on stylistic grounds to the thirteenth or fourteenth century, a period when Kilteel had connections to the Knights Hospitaller, a military religious order that held property in the area. The slab fragment was recorded by Manning in the early 1980s, and the detail of its mouldings, shallow concave channels cut along the angled edges of the stone, suggests it was made with some care, perhaps for a person of local standing. That it was found loose, outside the church wall, is a reminder of how frequently medieval funerary monuments were displaced, reused as building material, or simply lost to ground disturbance over the centuries.