In the village of Moone, County Kildare, a limestone graveslab carries two dates that have puzzled those who have examined it: 1624 and 1635. Known locally as the Brine slab, it now survives in three pieces, the fractures presumably the result of centuries of exposure or disturbance, yet the inscribed dates remain legible enough to raise an obvious question. Why two dates, separated by eleven years, on a single memorial stone?

Graveslabs of this period were not always straightforward commemorations of a single death. A slab might be carved in anticipation, with one date marking the commission or the death of a first family member and a later date added when a spouse or relative followed. The Brine family, whose name the slab carries, were evidently present in the Moone area in the early seventeenth century, a period when the region around this ancient monastic site was undergoing considerable change following the upheavals of the preceding decades. Limestone was the standard material for funerary monuments in Leinster at this time, durable and relatively workable, and slabs of this kind were typically incised with lettering, heraldic devices, or simple decorative borders. Whether the Brine slab carried imagery beyond its dates is not recorded in what survives of its description.