Set into the floor of the chancel of St Mary's Church in Leixlip, Co. Kildare, is a graveslab that most visitors would simply walk over without a second thought. That would be a pity, because the slab is a quietly arresting object: a large rectangular limestone flag, 2.2 metres long and over a metre wide, bearing a Latin inscription cut in Roman capitals. The lettering commemorates the death of Deborah Williams in 1697, and the formality of the script, classical rather than vernacular, gives the memorial an austere, deliberate quality that feels somewhat at odds with the domestic scale of the church around it.

Late seventeenth-century memorial slabs of this kind represent a particular moment in Irish funerary culture, when the conventions of Renaissance epigraphy, the use of Latin and Roman lettering borrowed from classical antiquity, were still being applied to Protestant burials in Church of Ireland parishes. The choice of Latin for a woman named Deborah Williams in a Kildare town in 1697 places her memorial firmly within an educated, Anglo-Irish Protestant milieu. The slab's position in the chancel, the area of a church traditionally reserved for clergy and the most prominent families of a parish, reinforces that social context. At over two metres in length, it is a substantial piece of cut stone, and the care taken with the incised lettering suggests a commission of some expense and intention.