Within the old church at Carbury in County Kildare, a small cluster of early eighteenth-century memorials records the Colley family in stone. There is a mausoleum on the site, and within it two commemorative plaques, one of them dated 1710 and clearly attributed to the Colleys, and a second whose inscription has worn beyond legibility. A third Colley plaque, dated 1705, is mounted separately on the church wall itself, making this a quietly concentrated record of one family across just a few years at the opening of the 1700s.

The Colley family were long-established in this part of Kildare, and the name carries some historical weight: the family is connected by descent to the Wellesleys, and therefore, at some remove, to Arthur Wellesley, the first Duke of Wellington. The monuments themselves are modest in the way that early eighteenth-century provincial memorials often are, their significance lying less in elaborate craftsmanship than in what they preserve, or in the case of the illegible plaque, no longer quite preserve. That one stone has lost its text entirely gives the group an uneven quality; two plaques speak, one has gone silent.