They stand now as a kind of collective, propped together rather than marking individual graves in the ground before them, which gives the arrangement an quietly unsettled quality.

One of the eight commemorates a Richard Benell, who died in 1686. That date places him in a turbulent decade in Irish history, just a few years before the Williamite War and the upheavals that reshaped land ownership and community life across the country. The graveyard itself is associated with the demesne at Blessington, a Co. Wicklow estate with deep connections to the Boyle family and later the Downshire estate. The headstone is modest in what it records, but the name and date together are enough to anchor one individual in a landscape that has changed considerably since the late seventeenth century.