A small limestone fragment, no larger than a hardback book, turned up in a garden in Skenagun, County Kildare, carrying what appears to be the ghost of a medieval graveslab. At just 25 centimetres long and 15 centimetres wide, it is an easy thing to overlook, and yet its surface retains traces of low-relief carving and a single incised line that may be a letter, the remnant of an inscription that once identified a person now completely unknown.

The fragment was found in the garden of a Mrs. Dalton, who at the time owned the lands associated with a nearby priory and tower. The connection to those structures is significant. Medieval gravestabs were typically cut from local stone and placed over burials within or immediately around ecclesiastical buildings, often carved with crosses, effigies, or text identifying the deceased by name, trade, or family. That this small piece survived at all, separated from whatever monument it once formed part of, and ended up in a domestic garden beside the ruins it likely originated from, is the kind of quiet accident that preserves fragments of the past. The detail comes from a 1986 survey by Bradley and colleagues, which catalogued the piece alongside the other monuments at the site.