Yet that is roughly the situation with this stone from Kells Priory in County Kilkenny, where a Latin inscription in Lombardic script, the formal lettered style favoured on medieval funerary monuments, announces the burial of Stephen, son of Hugh the clerk. The full text reads HIC JACET STEPHANUS FILI HUGONIS CLERICI, "Here lies Stephen, son of Hugh," carved along the edge of a tapering limestone slab measuring just over 1.6 metres in length.

Kells Priory was a house of Augustinian canons, a religious order whose members lived under a communal rule but carried out pastoral and administrative work in the wider world, and its grounds have yielded an unusually large collection of medieval graveslabs. This particular stone is decorated with an incised cross featuring a four-armed lozenge-shaped cross-head with concave sides and fleur-de-lis terminals, the shaft descending to a stepped base. Stylistically it belongs to the thirteenth or fourteenth century. The historian C. Manning, writing in 1991, proposed a date of around 1330 on the basis of historical inference, while noting a complication: documentary sources suggest that Stephen, son of Hugh the clerk, was still alive in the 1340s. Whether the slab was prepared in anticipation, inscribed posthumously with an approximate date, or simply marks a different Stephen altogether remains unresolved. The slab came to light in the late nineteenth century when the eastern end of the priory church's chancel was disturbed during work to extend a handball alley, a collision of medieval devotion and rural recreation that says something about how lightly such remains could be treated before systematic protection of archaeological sites became standard practice.