At a graveyard in Glassely, County Kildare, the fragments of an elaborate chest tomb lie reassembled after spending years buried in the earth. A chest tomb is a box-shaped above-ground monument, typically set against a wall or over a vault, and this one had been reduced to scattered pieces, sunk at various depths across the churchyard, before anyone thought to dig them up and document what remained.

The recovery of the fragments is credited to a Mr Fitzgerald, who found them in two separate episodes, in March 1898 and April 1900, and had them excavated with local help in order to photograph and make rubbings from the carved surfaces. What emerged was a puzzle of stone panels: two end pieces, each roughly 64 centimetres long and 54 centimetres wide, one carved with the Fitzgerald family arms and the other depicting the Crucifixion flanked by the Blessed Virgin Mary and St John. Three further fragments came from the front face of the tomb, arranged as a series of plain oblong niches, each housing a single figure, the male figures dressed in armour. Fitzgerald concluded that the tomb had originally been three-sided, positioned against a wall above a vault within the churchyard. The graveyard also contains the remains of a ruined church and a cross, giving the site a layered quality that extends well beyond a single monument.