Inside a nineteenth-century Church of Ireland building in County Kildare, set into a wall alcove on the south side of the chancel, two limestone figures kneel facing one another in perpetual prayer. The monument they occupy is a Renaissance canopied tomb, the kind of elaborate funerary architecture that became fashionable among the Anglo-Irish gentry in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, combining an arched or pillared canopy over sculpted effigies with heraldic panels displaying the family's coats of arms. What makes this particular example quietly arresting is its displacement: the tomb was not made for the building it now inhabits.

The figures represent Sir Gerald Aylmer, who died in 1634, and his wife Dame Julia Nugent, who predeceased him in 1617. The Aylmers were a prominent Kildare family, and the pairing of their effigies with armorial panels reflects the dynastic priorities that shaped memorial art of the period, recording lineage and alliance as much as grief. The church in which the tomb now sits was built in the nineteenth century, but it stands roughly ten metres north of an older ruined post-medieval church, which may itself have been raised on the site of an Early Christian foundation. It was from that older structure that the monument was removed. A plaque attached to the tomb records the transfer plainly: "This monument was moved from the old church, November, 1812, by Sir Fenton Aylmer Bart." The act of relocation was itself a form of commemoration, an early nineteenth-century baronet preserving the memory of seventeenth-century ancestors by carrying their effigies into a new building rather than leaving them to the decay of the old one.