In the south transept of Kildare Cathedral sits a sixteenth-century limestone tomb that spent an uncertain stretch of its existence broken into fragments and cemented into a graveyard wall. The effigy it carries, that of Walter Wellesley, Bishop of Kildare and commendatory prior of Great Connell Abbey, is carved with an almost obsessive attention to ecclesiastical dress: an amice at the neck, a chasuble with a panel of fine embroidery, a fringed dalmatic, an alb, and a girdle. His left hand, holding a foliated crozier, bears a maniple, the strip of cloth once worn by clergy during Mass, and his right hand is raised in blessing. Two angels hold shields bearing the Wellesley arms on either side of a pinnacled, crocketed canopy above him. Running along the lower edge of the slab, however, the tone shifts sharply: sprays of foliage, three green men with vegetation issuing from their mouths, a pair of grotesques, a figure blowing two trumpets simultaneously, and a sheela-na-gig, the explicit female figure found on many medieval Irish ecclesiastical buildings, whose appearance here alongside saintly imagery is entirely in keeping with the blunt eclecticism of late medieval Irish carving.

Walter Wellesley died in 1539, and the tomb was originally housed at Great Connell Abbey, a house of Augustinian canons in what is now County Kildare. The Latin inscription in incised Gothic lettering around the margin names him plainly: "Here lies brother Walter Wellesley, formerly bishop of Kildare and commendatory prior of this house, on whose soul God have mercy." At some point after the abbey fell into ruin, the tomb was dismembered and its fragments built into the south face of the abbey graveyard's west wall, flanking the entrance gate, where the photographer Edwin Rae recorded them in situ. It was the County Kildare Archaeological Society that arranged for the fragments to be retrieved and re-erected in Kildare Cathedral, a process completed on 17 July 1971. Reassembly brought its own complications: scholars have noted that the east side panel, depicting Saints Andrew, Thaddeus, and Matthias, does not appear to have originally belonged to this tomb at all, and the carving across the various panels suggests more than one hand was involved in its making.

The tomb can be seen today in the cathedral's south transept. The end panels are complete, showing an Ecce Homo at the head and a Crucifixion at the foot, while the west side panel, in two sections, carries figures of Saints John the Evangelist, Patrick, and Peter. The overall dimensions, roughly 1.9 metres long and just under a metre in height, give a sense of how much detail is compressed into a relatively modest structure. It rewards close looking, particularly along that lower chamfered edge where the sacred and the grotesque sit side by side without apparent contradiction.