Lying inside a Protestant church in the quiet south Kildare village of Timolin is a two-metre slab of carboniferous limestone bearing the bas-relief figure of a medieval knight, his body almost entirely concealed beneath a large shield. Bas-relief carving, where figures are raised slightly from a flat background rather than fully sculpted in the round, was a common mode for commemorative grave markers of the Norman period, and this example is considered a particularly fine one. What makes it quietly arresting is the combination of its scale, the quality of its cutting, and the question of who it was made to remember.

The slab dates to the late twelfth or early thirteenth century and is thought to represent Robert FitzRichard, a Norman lord who founded a convent for Arroasian nuns in Timolin around 1200. The Arroasians were a reformed congregation of Augustinian canons and nuns, originally from Arrouaise in northern France, who established a number of houses in Ireland during the twelfth century as part of the broader reorganisation of the Irish church. That a founder of such an institution would have been commemorated with a carved effigy of this quality is consistent with the patronage customs of the period. For centuries the slab remained outdoors in the local graveyard, exposed to the elements, before being moved into the Protestant church in 1907, where it has been sheltered ever since.