In the graveyard at Clane, County Kildare, a limestone table-tomb sits against a free-standing stone wall at the eastern end of a former parish church, quietly marking four centuries of local history. A table-tomb is exactly what the name suggests, a raised slab supported on side panels or legs, giving it the appearance of a large stone table, and they were typically commissioned by those wealthy enough to want a monument that would endure. This one belongs to William Wogan of Rathcoffey, who died in 1616, and its placement against the wall of the old church of St. Michael gives it a slightly tucked-away quality, as though it has been folded into the architecture of the site rather than displayed at the centre of it.

The Wogans were a prominent Anglo-Norman family long settled in County Kildare, with Rathcoffey Castle serving as their seat. William's tomb survives in limestone, a material well suited to detailed carving and durable enough to have held its form across four centuries. The early seventeenth century was a period when such commemorative monuments were still fashionable among the Pale gentry, families whose roots went back to the medieval English settlement of Ireland and who maintained a particular interest in visible, permanent memorialisation. That the tomb was positioned outside the east end of the church, the liturgically significant end where the altar would have stood inside, suggests the placement was deliberate rather than incidental.