Inside the remains of a medieval ringwork castle in Moone, County Kildare, there sits something that has nothing to do with the structure that surrounds it: a small cairn of stones sheltering a broken limestone slab, inscribed with a name and a date. The slab records the burial of one Thomas Ashe in 1741, which raises an immediate question. Why would someone be buried, or at least commemorated, inside the earthwork of a castle that by the eighteenth century would have been long abandoned and likely reduced to little more than a raised enclosure in the landscape?

A ringwork castle is an early medieval fortification consisting of a roughly circular bank and ditch, without the prominent central mound associated with the better-known motte and bailey form. They were common in Ireland in the period following the Anglo-Norman arrival in the twelfth century, and by the 1700s most had ceased to have any obvious defensive or administrative function. That someone chose this particular enclosure as a burial or memorial site in 1741 suggests the place still held some local significance, or perhaps simply offered a boundary, a sense of enclosure, that made it feel appropriate for marking a death. The limestone slab itself is broken, which gives the memorial an air of incompleteness, though the inscription has survived well enough to preserve Ashe's name and the year across nearly three centuries.