Among the medieval stonework gathered inside St. Brigid's Cathedral in Kildare town, one slab stands out for the precision of its ambition. A rectangular limestone tomb, measuring just over two and a half metres in length, carries the carved effigy of a sixteenth-century knight rendered in what is described as Italianate armour, a style of plate armour influenced by Renaissance Italian fashion that had begun filtering into Ireland through the Old English aristocracy. The figure bears a long sword, though the lower portion of the blade is now missing, and five heater-shaped shields, the triangular form familiar from heraldry, line the right-hand side of the slab, each bearing coats of arms.

The tomb commemorates Richard Fitzgerald of Lackagh, who died on the twentieth of December 1575. What makes the monument particularly striking is that it was commissioned not by Richard himself but by his widow, named in the inscription as Domina Margareta, whose surname is only partially legible. The Latin text carved around the margin records that she caused this monument to be made for the memory of her husband, described as a knight and formerly her spouse. The final line of the inscription is perhaps the most arresting detail of all: 'Walterus Brennagh me fecit', meaning Walter Brennagh made me. The craftsman signed his work, an unusual survival that attaches a name to what might otherwise be an anonymous piece of late medieval Irish stonework. The slab now sits in the south transept of the cathedral, part of a wider collection of cross slabs, grave slabs, and decorated stones at the site that spans roughly the tenth to the seventeenth centuries.