In the chancel of St. Brigid's Cathedral in Kildare, a limestone slab just under two metres long preserves a bishop in extraordinary detail. Carved in relief on a gently tapering, coffin-shaped stone, the figure is dressed in full episcopal vestments: an amice, chasuble, dalmatic, stole, and alb, each rendered with careful attention. A ring sits on the second finger of his right hand, both gloved hands rest flat on his chest, and a maniple hangs over his left wrist. Angels flank his head on either side, each holding a censer, and his feet rest against what appears to be an animal, or perhaps a headless and tailless bird, the exact creature now impossible to determine. It is the kind of image that rewards slow looking.

The bishop is traditionally identified as John of Taunton, who held the see of Kildare and died in 1258, which would place the carving somewhere in the mid-thirteenth century. The slab itself is decorated along one long side and parts of both ends with stiff-leaf foliage, a stylised carved plant form common in Gothic stonework of the period, giving the border a formal, architectural quality. His crozier, the hooked pastoral staff that serves as the symbol of a bishop's office, rests along the right side of the body, and his mitre sits over curling hair, suggesting the sculptor worked from close observation rather than convention alone. This effigy is one of three in the cathedral, which also holds a large collection of cross slabs, grave slabs, and decorated stones ranging in date from the tenth to the seventeenth centuries, gathered together in one of the oldest ecclesiastical sites in Ireland.