But this particular example in Kilmallock, County Limerick, carries on its face a small heraldic puzzle that rewards a closer look. Carved into the stone is a coat of arms bearing a motto, 'AUXILIUM MEUM AB ALTO', meaning 'My help is from on high', and a shield blazoned with two lion heads above an ermine chevron and a third lion head below. A crescent placed between the upper two lions signals, according to the conventions of heraldry, that the man commemorated here was a second son. Above the shield sits a knight's helmet with a closed visor, and from its crest rises a hand gripping a dagger. Sweeping down from the helmet and framing both sides of the shield is a mantling of oak leaves, decorative foliage that in heraldic tradition represents the cloth a knight wore over his helmet in battle.

The inscription identifies the occupant plainly: 'Here lieth the body of Lieutenant William Blakeney of Thomastown, who deceased the last of March, An dom 1664.' Blakeney was among the beneficiaries of the Cromwellian plantations, the mid-seventeenth-century redistribution of Irish land following the Parliamentarian conquest, through which he received a grant of 450 plantation acres across the townlands of Thomastown and Gortnepequiney. The family's presence in the landscape did not end with the last of the Blakeneys; the townland name Mountblakeney, still in use in the district, carries their memory forward in the way that Irish placenames so often preserve what gravestones alone cannot.

Kilmallock itself is a medieval walled town in south County Limerick, with several ecclesiastical remains that share the same general landscape as this tomb. Visitors exploring the graveyard should look carefully at the carved panels on the chest's sides and ends, where the quality of the heraldic detail becomes apparent only at close range. The ermine chevron in particular, a pattern representing a fur associated with noble rank, is worth examining for the fineness of its execution in stone. Lighting conditions matter here; overcast days often bring out surface carving more clearly than direct sunlight, which can flatten shallow relief work.