Inside the Fitzgerald mortuary chapel on the Kilkea Demesne in County Kildare, a limestone chest tomb records, in Roman capitals carved directly into the stone, the names of a man and both of his wives. The inscription reads: "Hier lieth Williame Fitzgerald and his first wife Ioan Keiting and his second wife Ciselle Geidon," and gives a precise date of death, the 21st of February 1623. That bluntness, the equal weight given to two marriages, the archaic spelling, the year announced as "the year of our God," gives the whole thing an oddly intimate quality for a formal funerary monument.

The tomb is a chest tomb, meaning a raised rectangular structure in which a flat or slightly angled slab, called a table, sits supported by side and end panels on a plinth. Here the table is chamfered at its edges to fit neatly against those panels, one of which is broken, with a section now lying on the ground. The decoration is carved in low false relief, a technique in which the design is slightly raised from the background rather than deeply cut. The centrepiece is a fleur-de-lys cross on steps, with the letters IHS, a longstanding Christogram derived from the Greek name of Jesus, at the centre of the transom. Above the cross, a sun and a moon are shown with faces. A separate band carries the initials WFG and IK. The end panel, measuring roughly half a metre high by sixty-four centimetres wide, depicts a Crucifixion. The whole ensemble is consistent with early seventeenth-century Irish funerary carving, where religious symbolism, family identity, and the plain facts of death were expected to share the same surface without much hierarchy between them.