A few metres east of the northeast corner of a nineteenth-century Church of Ireland building in Rathangan, a stone sits among the graves doing quiet double duty. To a casual eye it is just another gravemarker, but it is in fact a punch-dressed stone corbel, a projecting bracket once built into the fabric of a medieval church, salvaged and repurposed long after that earlier building fell away. The Church of Ireland structure that replaced it stands in the western quadrant of the same graveyard, almost certainly on the footprint of its predecessor.

The medieval church here was dedicated to the Virgin Mary, and the earliest written trace of it dates to 1297, when a vicar named Richard is recorded in connection with it. By 1306 it had been designated a prebend of the diocese of Kildare, meaning it was assigned to support a cathedral clergyman, a common arrangement in medieval ecclesiastical administration. Historical references to its clergy suggest the church remained in active use through the later medieval centuries, but by 1744 it had fallen into serious disrepair. That year, Robert, Earl of Kildare, left £200 in his will toward rebuilding it, a sum that points both to the building's deteriorated state and to the continued sense of obligation felt by local nobility toward a site that had been part of the parish for nearly five centuries.

The repurposed corbel is easy to overlook, sitting low among the other markers a short distance from the church's northeast angle. It is the kind of object that rewards a slow walk through the graveyard rather than a quick glance from the path, a fragment of dressed stonework that carries the outline of a much older building in its grain.